I grew up in rural Queensland, Australia (Gympie, to be exact — home to the infamous Gympie Gympie plant). I was interested in science from a fairly young age, though probably more interested in mathematical problems. From about the age of eight I remember thinking that I’d be a physicist when I grew up — I’m fairly sure that was on a recommendation by my awesome parents. My interest, really, was the “big questions”: what is the Universe?, why is it here?, how can we describe it?, how old is it?
I loved school, and I set myself constant challenges. Meanwhile, I enjoyed playing sports (mostly cricket, but a bit of soccer, tennis and rugby as well). I also learned piano from a fairly young age, and ended up using that particular skill to earn some money in my teenage years, teaching.
I went to high school at Matthew Flinders Anglican College (MFAC) on the Sunshine Coast, which was an excellent school, both for academics and music (I had the opportunity to play in the concert band at the Sydney Opera House!). I ended up focusing on maths and physics, which set up my future fairly well.
I went to the University of Queensland for my undergrad degree, majoring in mathematics (actually, I did half + 1 of my subjects in maths, and half – 1 in physics, and so just missed out on a double-major). I made up the extra physics subject in my honours year at the University of Western Australia.
Between UQ and UWA I took a year off to get to know (and marry!) my wonderful wife Jeanette, which we spent in Toowoomba (which is also incidentally one of my favourite towns in the world). Right after we got married we headed to Western Australia (our honeymoon was the drive over!), so I could start my Honours project with Prof. John Hartnett.
For my Honours project, I worked on large-scale structure in the SDSS and GAMA surveys, focusing on some peculiar features in the galaxy distribution which potentially indicated periodic radial density perturbations around our galaxy. While the peculiar features turned out to be statistically insignificant, I learned a great deal about understanding the large scale structure (correlation functions and power spectra etc.) in that year, and took that with me to my PhD, for which I stayed at UWA and my supervisors were Chris Power and Aaron Robotham.
During this time, my wife and I had three kids — Emily was born just before I started my PhD, Joshua was born in the middle, and Caleb was born a couple of months before I submitted. They’ve been an immense joy and source of energy throughout the whole adventure.
Following my PhD, I transitioned mainly into radio astronomy, specifically Epoch of Reionization and Cosmic Dawn, in a postdoc position with Cath Trott.
The cool thing is, those big questions that I started out with are exactly the ones I get to research in detail every day. I’m looking for the signature of the very first stars in the Universe! I consider the effects of mysterious quantities such as dark matter and dark energy, and I do all of this using the language of physics: mathematics. I truly feel blessed to have landed in this position.