Profile

I’m Sean, I love sports, music and fixing stuff. More recently I’m an aspiring geek studying for a PhD in London.

When I’ve escaped from our labs I have a campervan that I attempt navigate to interesting cities and sunny places!

I had an injury on my bike when I was 16 and use a wheelchair, since then I’ve been really enthusiastic about new engineering developments and how engineers work with medics and patients. I’ve also been playing wheelchair rugby for the Stoke Mandeville Maulers which is a cool sport you should check out!

My work is about developing a ‘neuromodulation device’- this is about zapping peoples nerves with electricity to help the nerves work after they have been injured. My project is to make a device to help people with injuries to their spinal cord control their bladders. This involves a big mixture of different things- reading, experimenting on people (volunteers both with injuries and not!), coding, designing circuits, making prototypes and a tiny bit of teaching…

Before this, I studied for a Masters degree in Medical Engineering at Cardiff University which took 4 years. In the summer holidays I worked at an engineering company called Renishaw PLC with their medical devices teams.

Every day is a little bit different, but typically I might spend a few minutes in the morning doing organisation things- replying to emails, sorting out visits to other peoples labs etc.

Then I either spend time with patients enrolled in our research- looking at how their nerves work (or not) to help inform my project, or working on designing, making and testing our devices we use for research with patients. I might spend some time analysing the data or doing some reading about previous research that has been done.

I will use to money to buy equipment to build a kit our lab can use for school teaching to show the kind of work we do. This will include a ‘design a wheelchair’ and a ‘measuring the nervous system’ component. I will make the kit with work experience students who spend time in our lab