Tom Farley Email and Phone Number

I am taking a paternity career break between transitioning from academia to industry to spend time with my two year old son by working part-time in beautiful surroundings on the Dorset coast. Together with my wife, I am managing the catering and websites for the Othona retreat centre charity. Managing the centre's catering involves everything from menu planning, food ordering and stock checking, health and safety and hygiene management to meal preparation. We provide healthy, hearty… Show more I am taking a paternity career break between transitioning from academia to industry to spend time with my two year old son by working part-time in beautiful surroundings on the Dorset coast. Together with my wife, I am managing the catering and websites for the Othona retreat centre charity. Managing the centre's catering involves everything from menu planning, food ordering and stock checking, health and safety and hygiene management to meal preparation. We provide healthy, hearty meals for up to 30 visitors staying at the centre. Working within a £20k annual catering budget requires careful menu planning and sourcing of produce to prepare quality, healthy food made with environmentally conscious ingredients. We cater to visitors with a wide range of dietary requirements and allergies, requiring a range of menu alternatives and stringent separation of allergens.Alongside my main role, I have applied my technical skills to take on project management of the redevelopment of the Othona charity’s three websites. This began with an audit of our existing Drupal CMS websites and CiviCRM database to understand our requirements for a costly Drupal upgrade. I identified it would be far more economical and effective to produce new, modern, WordPress based websites instead. This led to a £15k tender to develop and host the new websites and integrate with our existing CiviCRM database. I have lead the project from requirements definition through to project delivery, regularly liaising between the web developers and our stakeholders.I have also applied my technical expertise to updating the organisation’s digital practises, transitioning from a local server to Google Workspace services and provided training workshops and inductions for colleagues to help them better utilise workplace tools.As part of the core residential team at Othona, I also take on a variety of other tasks ranging from event hosting and facilitation to building maintenance and administrative work. Show less

As responsible officer for the MAST-Upgrade tokamak's infra-red (IR) thermography systems, I was responsible for installation, reliable operation and data analysis of the MAST-U IR thermography system used to make divertor power load measurements key to the UK and EU fusion physics programs. This involved performing a broad range of dedicated analysis for internal and international collaborators as well as developing validated end-to-end analysis workflows to provide routine, rapid heatflux… Show more As responsible officer for the MAST-Upgrade tokamak's infra-red (IR) thermography systems, I was responsible for installation, reliable operation and data analysis of the MAST-U IR thermography system used to make divertor power load measurements key to the UK and EU fusion physics programs. This involved performing a broad range of dedicated analysis for internal and international collaborators as well as developing validated end-to-end analysis workflows to provide routine, rapid heatflux measurements and science output during experiments. In particular, I was responsible for delivery of one of three physics KPI measurements required to receive the £21 million MAST-U Enhancements funding package from EUROfusion and EPSRC, to meet the Dec 2021 EU departure deadline. Automation of IR data collection required interfacing with proprietary camera control software and the main MAST-U control system, to keep track of machine status to correctly configure and arm the camera systems ahead of experimental pulses. The outputted video files then needed to be converted between file formats to store additional metadata and transferred to the central data archive, where my physics analysis routines would produce refined, calibrated physics parameters for use across the wider MAST-U research programme. These physics routines called a variety of python and C libraries to reproject the spatial coordinates of the visible plasma facing surfaces and solve the heat conduction equation to reconstruct the incident heatfluxes.Delivery of the MAST-U IR thermography systems required that I install and commission over £300k of IR imaging, data relay and computing equipment, as well as the management of the design and procurement of bespoke infrastructure and scientific equipment.As Scientific Coordinator I lead planning, execution and exploitation of specific fusion experiments, coordinating a team to ensure maximum value was gained from scarce machine time. Show less

For my PhD I worked at the Culham Center for Fusion Energy (CCFE), a world leading research center focused on developing clean, safe energy from nuclear fusion as a pivotal technology to help meet the world's growing energy demands. I developed the data analysis tools to perform tomographic inversions and analysis of high speed visible camera footage (100 kfps) of plasma emission in the MAST tokamak. Identifying, measuring and labelling a plasma filament in a camera image is highly… Show more For my PhD I worked at the Culham Center for Fusion Energy (CCFE), a world leading research center focused on developing clean, safe energy from nuclear fusion as a pivotal technology to help meet the world's growing energy demands. I developed the data analysis tools to perform tomographic inversions and analysis of high speed visible camera footage (100 kfps) of plasma emission in the MAST tokamak. Identifying, measuring and labelling a plasma filament in a camera image is highly technical and often subjective and can take an experienced labeler minutes to perform. My automated workflow enabled thousands of filaments to be identified and measured in this time, with much greater accuracy, consistency and reproducibility. With tomographic inversion of the plasma emission, treated as an ordinary least squares problem, the matrix inversion was performed using the SART algorithm, with Laplacian regularisation applied to limit noise amplification. The watershed algorithm was used to identify the locations of plasma filaments and 2D gaussian profiles were fitted to measure their sizes. A tracking algorithm was developed to measure their velocities and lifetimes. This produced large filament datasets which were used to measure a range of statistical properties of the filaments to validate stochastic models of filament generation.I spent the first year of my PhD working on a separate project investigating alternatives to the use of cesium in negative ion sources used in fusion heating systems. During this time I gained experience collecting and analysing data from a range of smaller plasma devices in CCFE, Liverpool and Marseilles using laser photo detachment, mass spectrometry and Langmuir probes . A year into my PhD project, funding problems at CCFE led to the shutdown of the experiment on which my PhD was based. I reached out to different research groups and constructed the new PhD project outlined above, developing complementary, but very different set of skills. Show less

As part of a 12 month year in industry placement working on the JET tokomak at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) I pioneered a technique and developed the analysis tools to measure plasma scrape-off layer power decay lengths from infra-red images of the walls of a tokamak. This technique was highly successful and is now a standard technique used internationally. I performed analysis of large dedicated {experimental database leading to a publication in the leading journal in the field… Show more As part of a 12 month year in industry placement working on the JET tokomak at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) I pioneered a technique and developed the analysis tools to measure plasma scrape-off layer power decay lengths from infra-red images of the walls of a tokamak. This technique was highly successful and is now a standard technique used internationally. I performed analysis of large dedicated {experimental database leading to a publication in the leading journal in the field, Nuclear Fusion: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/53/7/073016. Show less