Profile

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Clár-Bríd Tohill

    • About Me:

      I am an astronomer from the University of Nottingham working on distant galaxies! I love to travel and spent last year working at a telescope 🔭 in the Canary Islands! I love bouldering 🧗🏻‍♀️ , animals (my dog is called Bob), learning different languages, and I also love to play video games 🎮 when i’m not working.

    • Read more

      I am from Ireland originally but I love travelling and have lived in lots of places from San Diego California to a small island in the Canaries. I am currently living in Nottingham with another astronomer and spend a lot of my time doing science. When I am not working I also love to cook, explore new places and try new things. Last year I lived on an island with an active volcano! Scary but very cool…

    • My pronouns are:

      she/her

    • My Work:

      I am an astronomer from the University of Nottingham working on very distant galaxies. I want to be able to understand them better and so I use telescopes in space to take lots of photos and investigate the different types of galaxies we can see far far away!

    • Read more

      I am interested in understanding how these weirdly shaped distant galaxies grow and evolve through time into the beautiful spiral shaped galaxies that we see today! To do this I am training a machine to separate these galaxies into different groups depending on what they look like so that I can investigate them further.

    • My Typical Day:

      I start my day early (normally with a cup of coffee!) and go to my office at work. I spend the morning working on my research, looking at lots of different galaxies! I have lunch with the other scientists and then it’s back to work either continuing with my research or working on writing down everything I’ve done so far. Normally I head home around 5pm.

    • Read more

      I share an office with 5 other astronomers and so we spent a lot of time discussing each others research and coming up with new and interesting ideas. We all work on galaxies and so it can be really helpful to talk about your work with someone else who understands the problem you are trying to solve. I am also part of a group that has an inflatable planetarium that we use for outreach and I, along with some other students, sometimes go to local schools in the afternoon to put on a show and teach the children about space.

    • What I'd do with the prize money:

      I work as a manager of a group called the Inflativerse where we bring an inflatable planetarium around to schools in the local area to teach them about space. We now also host other activities like galaxy classification classes and learning about the constellations with the aim to encourage children to stay in education and teach them about University and the opportunities it offers.  We have recently got the funds for a new projector for the planetarium however we still need to raise money for a new dome so I would use the funds to go towards that project.

    My CV

    • Education:

      I went to school in Ireland and then went to the University of Kent in Canterbury for my physics degree and masters. I am now studying for my PhD at the University of Nottingham.

    • Qualifications:

      11 GCSEs including Maths, Further Maths, English, Science, Irish (and more), A-Levels in Maths, Physics, Sociology and French, and a MPhys degree in Physics with Astrophysics. I am currently working towards getting my PhD in Physics with Astronomy

    • Work History:

      I used to work as a secretary in an office during my undergraduate degree to save some money, it was very different from studying physics but I really enjoyed it and the people I worked with! When I moved to Nottingham I worked as a demonstrator in a physics lab and spent a lot of time marking books (which I did not enjoy as much). More recently I have been working with an inflatable planetarium called the Inflativerse which I love!

    • Current Job:

      I am a PhD student.

    • Employer:

      University of Nottingham.

    • My Interview

      • What did you want to be after you left school?

        I always wanted to be an Astronaut!

        Were you ever in trouble at school?

        once or twice...

        If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?

        I would love to be an archaeologist and dig up some cool things!

        Who is your favourite singer or band?

        I listen to lots of different artists but one of my favourites is Elvis!

        What's your favourite food?

        Any type of pasta as long as there is garlic bread!

        If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!

        I would love to have my own telescope, more holidays and a teleport machine so I could visit my dog whenever I wanted!

        Tell us a joke.

        What did you call the electricity detective? ...Sherlock Ohms!

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