Profile

I live with my husband and our 1 year old daughter, in Wokingham. I am Italian and I have been living in UK for almost 10 years now. I love to grow my own vegetables and I love to cook delicious Italian food. I also love LEGO, and I have a large amount of it at home; I love any animals made of LEGO!

I am an experimental physicist. My work consists in developing new types of electrical circuits. The circuits I made are very tiny and I build them in very special rooms where the air is so cleaned that I cannot enter with my everyday clothes, I need to wear special garments, overshoes, face mask and protective googles. Using particular instruments I can build theses circuit and then I can have a look at them under a microscope. If I then think that the circuit might work I bring it to the lab and mount it on a special machine that is called cryostat. The cryostat can cool these circuits down to very lo temperature, something like -273degree Celsius. When these circuits are very cold they have very interesting properties, and I perform experiments to test these properties. In order to perform the experiments I have to setup instruments together, make some electrical cabling and use a computer to run the experiment itself. I then need to analyse the data I take and if I get nice results I write a scientific report that can be printed in scientific journals.

I do not have a typical day at work!

If I need to build a new circuit I could spend few days thinking about how to build it. Or, if I decide what to build I could spend days doing so. If I have an experiment set up, this could last even few months, then my day would be most of the time sitting in front of the computer running experiments by controlling several instruments altogether.

But there are time in which I need to update some instrumentation, so I would spend time in making some new cables for example, or in soldering few pieces together. At other time I might need to buy a new instrument and I could spend few days looking for what to buy as scientific instruments are very expensive and you don’t want to buy  the wrong one!