Cambridge

Cambridge now feels rather like a second home for me, after spending eight years studying there at Pembroke College (pictured left), and I'm very glad that I have had the opportunity to live and work there. If you want to get a better idea of the surroundings the College provides a very good virtual tour - including the Graduate Parlour where I was close to a permanent fixture during my time as the GP President. Of course there are plenty of other attractive and historic buildings around the city that help to make it such a pleasant place to live, and there are plenty of sites around with pictures of them. The best I've come across is this one, a large collection of arty black and white photographs.

After a first degree in Chemical Engineering, I stayed on in the department as a research student, studying polymer processing. As part of the Microscale Polymer Processing Project, I studied the behaviour of a variety of molten polystyrenes in flow through a slit die using a Multi-Pass Rheometer, indirectly measuring the stresses within the melt by flow induced birefringence and comparing them to numerical predictions calculated from theoretical models. The final result was my PhD thesis, Microscale Processing of Polystyrene Melts: its summary [pdf] is online if you want to know a bit more.

While I've spent much of my own time orienteering, which merits its own page and is in any case best enjoyed as far away from the Fens as possible, there are plenty of other things to do in the city. Not least its many pubs - away from the plague of huge new chain pubs in the centre there are some real gems, such as the St Radegund, or the non-smoking Free Press and Cambridge Blue. Finally, on a more active level there are still plenty of nice places to run around Cambridge despite the lack of hills. Eric Roller produced a very nice online Guide to Training Runs, while the WAOC runners group have a weekly run further afield.