Thomas Edwards

I'm a PhD student at Imperial College, researching nanowire solar cells. A lot of my research consists of writing scripts in Python/Matlab/Bash. I use these scripts to run simulations of light propagating through different solar cell designs, run calculations and analyse data.

At Imperial College I was surrounded by people with an entrepreneurial flair and a propensity to 'hack', i.e coming up with creative solutions to solve technical problems. Through osmosis and a renewed drive to better myself, I learned some web development skills and started attending 'Hackathons'. In the past my team won 'best mobile app' at the EdTech 2013 Hackathon, and gold medal at the Hack4Good climate change hackathon with our solar prediction tool www.runonsun.co.uk.

Now I'm rekindling my interest in electronics and hardware. I'm currently in the flight control team for the Imperial College CubeSat. I'm also currently working on a project with a colleague to build a Coffee vending machine.