Blog

---

Some Figures From My PhD

Here is a small assortment of figures that I made during my PhD with the TWIST and INSPIRE groups, mainly for my thesis. I started to learn Blender shortly after the start of my PhD, but I ended up switching to POV-Ray, which is the tool used to create most of the images on this page (the only exception being the H-shaped skyrmion render, for which I used Blender). Although POV-Ray is significantly older and has fewer features than Blender, I have found it to be much more simple to use where more complex mathematics is required to describe an object (with Blender, I always felt like I was having to “hack” it in order to create what I wanted, even with the Python API).

AI Can Generate Pretty Good Music Now

It seems like ChatGPT has been around forever now, and despite only having used it for a year or so, many people wonder how they ever lived without it. I recently discovered that a similar service exists for audio, where songs can be generated from a prompt. One example of such a service is Udio. At the time of writing, it is free to use, albeit with a limited (but generous) number of credits.

I Got My PhD!

After years of work, my PhD journal has finally come to an end! I defended my thesis “Creation and Manipulation of Topological Magnetic Textures in Chiral and Frustrated Magnets” at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz on 14th May 2024, with the grade 1.0 (“very good”).

Read my thesis here.

USA 2022

Between June and August 2022, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Ran Cheng’s group at the University of California, Riverside, to work on a (still ongoing, at time of writing) project. This post, however, is about the exciting things I got up to when I was not working!

Rather than flying directly to Los Angeles, I decided that I would book my flight to Seattle, a city that I had been wanting to visit for a good decade. I would then take the Amtrak down to Portland, another city I’d been dreaming of going to for a good while, and then further onwards to Los Angeles and Riverside. I flew with Condor, and the flight was a pretty nice experience. On the way, I got a nice view of Mainz, the city I called home for the first year and a half of my PhD.

Photography

As a teenager, I was quite into photography, especially after my parents got me a Canon EOS 600D for Christmas when I was 15. Although I don’t really do so much of this at the moment, here is a collection of photos that I have taken in various places around the world.