> 1- What inspired you to pursue physics as your career?

I am afraid that I wound up in physics quite by accident. I didn’t choose physics when I went to university, I picked chemistry because my favourite topic was quantum mechanics and I had met that first in chemistry. After I finished my undergraduate degree I did a PhD in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, like in the hospitals) and MRI labs are in different departments at different universities. My first job after the PhD was at a university where the MRI lab was in the physics department and when I came to UNB the MRI lab was also in the physics department. The cool thing is.. it turns out that quantum mechanics was physics after all, so I sometimes get to teach my favourite subject. (And MRI works by quantum mechanics too, when you look at the details.)

> 2- In your opinion which scientists would make your list and why?

This is a crazy hard question. After much debate and with some regret, I will go with:

A) Richard Feynman - he was such a great science communicator. If you haven’t watched any of his videos you should, just to hear him say “curvature” with a New York accent.

B) Emmy Nöther (sometimes written Noether) - brilliant, brilliant mathematician who noticed a relationship between symmetry and what we call conservation laws. This observation completely reshaped modern physics. When she was making her greatest discoveries it was very hard for women working in science and she was *still* able to revolutionize several areas of mathematics.

C) Albert Einstein - dude, it’s Einstein. Einstein wrote 5 papers in 1905, they were all different and all equally important. He could have stopped then, but didn’t. It is hard to overestimate his contributions to physics.

D) Michael Faraday - Faraday had no formal mathematical training, but still had brilliant insight into how nature works. He is often described as “the greatest experimentalist of all time” and, as I am an experimental physicist, he should probably be on my list.

E) Thomas Young - I’m sort of obliged to put Young on the list, because he and I went to the same college (not quite at the same time). Young was responsible for designing the experiment that showed light could behave like a wave. The same experiment has been used over and over again to show that lots of different things can behave like waves: protons, electrons and even big molecules, for example. Also, Young didn’t just do physics: he studied the human body, musical harmony and Egyptian hieroglyphics too.  I think he probably didn’t have much free time.

I’ve used letters not numbers, because they are all equally great.

> 3- How have you benefited from selecting this career path to pursue?

I didn’t realize when I started out how much I would enjoy teaching. I have been very lucky to work in a university because I get to do science research and then talk to people who are interested in learning science too. I wouldn’t have ended up living in Canada unless I had followed this career path and that’s something we’re pretty happy about.

> 4- What have you contributed to the world of science, and what do you hope to contribute?

I have contributed astonishingly little: there’s a lot of science out there and I have only done a tiny bit of it. I am most proud of an MRI method we invented to measure fast flow, but hardly anyone has noticed :-) and that doesn’t matter at all. On a day to day basis, science progresses through small advances. Every now and again there is a big revolutionary idea or observation, but those are all built upon little, careful steps. I’d like to use MRI to measure the flow of plasma, there are some problems with that, but I think it can be done.

> 5- Do you have someone who inspired you to be the person you are today?


My parents and my family. It was my Dad’s 76th birthday at the weekend and my Mum (British spelling) will be 73 on the 24th. They are both inspirational in different ways. My Dad was a medic and scientist, actually, but I think that’s incidental to their being inspirational. My wife and daughters are inspiring every single day.

> 6- What made you interested in the field of physics?

See above - I didn’t know that is what I was interested in to start with, but the way that the universe operates is surprising and fascinating and physics is in the business of studying what makes the universe tick.

> 7- What's your favorite scientific invention?

Just one? Wow… I choose the Stirling engine: made for all the right reasons in 1816 and still relevant today.

> 8- What makes you want to continue researching?

Each new experimental result (or lack of results) suggests some new things to try, there’s always some new thing to understand just around the corner.

> 9- What advice do you have to students that are interested in this specific field.

I think the most important advice is “you can do it”. Lot’s of people think that science (and specifically physics) might be hard. It is hard (sometimes), but so are lots of things that are worth doing. However, ordinary people like me can learn about science and contribute to our (human beings’) understanding of how everything around us works together. That’s a wonderful thing.

> 10- What have you learned form your mistakes and success?


I have learnt that everything you do, not matter how small it seems, makes a difference to other people. Mistakes and successes can both inspire you (in slightly different ways) not to give up.