Personal Information

About David

David started his academic career in 1992, studying Physics at Heriot-Watt University. In July 1996, he graduated and was let loose on the wider world of business. Having already secured a place on the M.Sc. Astronomy course at Sussex, he decided to spend the summer writing software for unsuspecting school children for a certain Cambridge-based software company.

David studied Astronomy at the University of Sussex between 1996 and September 1997. His supervisor was Dr Richard Rijnbeek. He spent the few weeks following the end of the course trying to catch up on sleep.

After studying Astronomy, he completed a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in the Solar Theory Group at the University of St Andrews. This took four years rather than the traditional three so, as you can imagine, it was very nearly a tearful experience for him by the time he came to say goodbye to the place.

In a departure from the route often associated with graduates from numerate disciplines, David decided not to pursue a career in defence, aerospace or in "The City", instead developing open source software in the field of Human Computer Interaction for a company in Leicester. Sadly, this came to an end in late 2002, but the experience was not without results. [Note: These resources are no longer online.]

2003 took the form of an unplanned sabbatical during which David submitted job applications, received lots of rejection letters from various institutions (some didn't even extend this courtesy), attended a few job interviews (including some truly awful ones conducted over the telephone) and abandoned state-organised skills "training". He also wrote some open source software, so at least the experience wasn't completely wasted.

From 2004 to 2008, he wrote technical documentation for Trolltech in Oslo, then tried to do the same for Nokia.

In 2011, he left Nokia to work at met.no.