I’m the one on the right

I’m a musician and scientist from Saltburn-by-the-sea and based in Leeds, having just completed a PhD in soft matter physics with Mike Evans at the University of Leeds.

Music

I mostly play bass and accordion, but originally studied classical piano and violin. My particular speciality is big band, jazz and similar, and I also perform in a number function, pop and pit-orchestra settings (sight reading!). I arrange quite a bit for large ensembles, and have worked for Sibelius during my PhD, providing technical and musical support for users of the best score-writing software there is. I’ve studied with the excellent upright/electric doubler Geoff Chalmers and Leeds electric bass hero/tutor Scott Devine, and am influenced particularly by Laurence Cottle and Steve Swallow.

At Leeds I played bass with LUU Big Band, an award winning 21-piece band made up of the best players in the university, recognised as one of the top big bands in the North of England. I MD’d in 2010-11, and write arrangements for the band as often as I can. Last year we recorded music and video for an ITV drama, played a joint concert with Liane Carroll, and were invited to play at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam.

I’m the bassist in Blues Armada, an 8-piece, 5-piece and trio jazz and function band with a residency at Relish, Doncaster, and have performed with other function/jazz outfits such as Kate Peters, AJ Brown and Rhythmatic.

I’ve appeared on Channel 4, the cover of ArtRocker and won the Jack Daniels UK-wide unsigned band competition with the now-defunct Neon Kicks, with whom I played synth and guitar. We recorded a couple of nice demos with George Shilling, which you can still hear on the myspace.

Details about teaching, examples of arrangements and other media are on my music page.

Physics

The reason I’m at Leeds is because of my excellent PhD supervisor Mike Evans — his website is here. Together we have been researching nonequilibrium phenomena in the phase behaviour of soft matter, specifically colloids, by a combined simulation and theory approach. I’ll shortly be starting a post-doc with Peter Olmsted within the CAPITALS programme.

I teach physics undergraduates about computer programming, practical lab work and various other topics. I seem to be quite lucky in choosing good conferences to go to, in that they are sometimes in Corsica.

Other

I like table tennis, football and cooking. Along with Tobias Perkins, Nico Taylor and my dad (presumably other people too, although I’m not sure who) I’m a big fan of Cormac McCarthy’s books.