A picture of me.

Tom Hodson

Maker, Baker Programmer Reformed Physicist RSE@ECMWF

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Welcome to my little home on the web! Take a look at my CV below or have a look at my blog. Click any item for a little more detail.

Work

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European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Reading, UK
ECMWF's logo, it looks like a stylised O joined to a C... or maybe a G joined to a C.

I’m working on bringing new kinds of data into the ECMWF’s weather forecast. Think air quality sensors attached to vehicles or wind data coming from off shore wind farms. My job title is “Research Software Engineer for IoT Observations”.

Education

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Ph.D in Condensed Matter Theory

Imperial College London
A colourful scientific figure from my work.

Supervisor: Dr Johannes Knolle

Collective Behaviours are what you get when a big collection of things interact with one another. Think of a flock of starlings or a mexican wave in a stadium. Now when you make the things quantum too, really interesting things happen…

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M.Sc Thesis, Natural Sciences

Trinity College, Cambridge
A line drawn CAD model of vector magnet.

Supervisor: Professor Mete AtatĂĽre

The project centered around the use of a Nitrogen-Vancancy defect in a nanoscale diamond to detect magnetic fields with ultra high resolution. We experimented with mounting such a nano-diamond to the tip of an atomic force microscope in order to produce field images. I built a 3d vector magnetometer in order to determine the axis of a defect in a nano-diamond.

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CERN Summmer Studentship

Trinity College, Cambridge
Some electrical probes on a silicon wafer.

I worked at CERN for 3 months as a summer student, helping to design a high volume electronic measurement process for prototypes of 8 inch silicon sensors that will be used in a planned upgrade to the CMS endcap Calorimeter for the new High Luminsosity LHC upgrade. My time was split between working in a clean room on the measurement setup, analysing the data and attending a 6 week lecture course on High Energy Physics.

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Physics, Natural Sciences M.Sc & B.Sc

Trinity College, Cambridge

Third Year: First (77%) Rank: 23rd / 155
Second Year: First (78%) Rank: 73rd / 582
First Year: High 2.1 (67%)

Side Projects

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Collective Misbehaviour

Imperial College London
A logo for the project composed of overlapping circles.

An interactive poetry collaboration with Dan Simpson the then poet-in-residence at Imperial College London and Sophie Nadel.

FizzPOP Makerspace Director

Birmingham
The animated logo of fizzpop with a little spinner attached to the letter f

FizzPOP is a community based workshop and social enterprise that fosters small technology and design projects. As one of the 5 founding directors I helped take it from a small group meeting in a borrowed space to a thriving community of more than 30 members with well equipped workshops and regular events.

PyProblems

Imperial College London
A spinning image of the earth but distorted as if it were a black hole.
A series of scientific coding exercises on General Relativity. Read more.

(Hack|Make|Data)thons

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Creativity Sandpit

The Collective + Imperial
A photo of me setting up a rube goldberg machine as part of the event.

Conceptualised and pitched an accessible Android OS for the elderly.

DigiFAB and FoNS Data Science Datathon

Imperial College London
The gather.town room where the competition was held.

Led a winning team of PhD students on this challenge to predict crystal structure and packing density from chemical structure data. Used a variety of techniques including recent advances in graph neural network techniques to win the competition.

MSF Makeathon

Imperial College Friends of Médecins Sans Frontières
The gather.town room where the competition was held.

Designed and prototyped an inflatable mattress to reduce pressure sores for patients in field hospitals.

Read more.