James Stevenson Email & Phone Number

Royal Observatory Edinburgh

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

St Andrews

I am carried out my PhD in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews. My work concentrated on the production and analysis of thin polymer fibres (hundreds of nanometers to a few microns) through the use of electrospinning.I regularly worked with an electrospinning apparatus that I had customised and designed components for, to produce both random and ordered sets of fibres. Further to this I carried out analysis through a wide range of different techniques from optical spectroscopy to SEM. I have also made use of various programming environments (Labview, Mathematica) to control experiments and to analyse data.

St Andrews

During my PhD I chose to take part in the academic teaching that goes on in the department. The main aspect that I had been involved in was the tutoring of undergraduate students. For three years, during each semester I led 1 hour tutorial sessions on first year level physics for several groups of around 8 undergraduate students. This entailed marking handed in work and highlighting any issues before discussing the fundamental concepts and any sections that were hard to follow. I was also responsible for the marking of mid semester class tests and discussion of solutions.I did one year of tutoring at second year physics level involving similar tasks.Further to these I have worked for a few semesters as a workshop assistant. In this scenario I was one of 3-4 assistants on hand to help 20-30 undergraduate students with conceptual issues on a weekly issued worksheet and then mark hand in work after the 1 hour session is over.

Livingston

I was a project student working with Scalar Technologies through the STEP program from the Bright Business Partnership. The aim of my project was to test if a spectrometer with a high enough resolution for the purposes of the business could be fabricated with relatively low cost diffractive elements.During my time working on this project, I worked closely with the small team at Scalar to put together a darkened environment suitable for optical testing before assembling a test setup based on the elements made available to me.By the end of the project I had concluded that it would be possible with a more permanent setup to achieve the goals the company was looking for. The company intended to pursue this further.

St Andrews

During the summer break between undergraduate years I undertook a research project with Dr Pascal André. The focus of this project was the analysis of the effect of adding silver nanoparticles to organic emissive layers. This involved me synthesising nanoparticles, creating organic layers with and without additives and then measuring the spectroscopic properties of the resulting samples.