I've been involved in both academia and industry engineering for over five years now. In 2017 I began teaching a number of engineering courses, before moving into industry in early 2022.
Industry experience
After completing my PhD at the beginning of 2022, I started my career at a medium-sized company designing and manufacturing nanosatellites for Australia's booming space industry. During my 18 months in this role, I spent considerable time manufacting and testing a few attitude determination and control subsystems such as reaction wheels and magnetorquers. I was also responsible for finding, diagnosing, and fixing a number of bugs in the satellite firmware, including a temperature misread on a critical component that had gone unnoticed for years.
As of December 2023, components I worked on are currently orbiting the Earth, circling at about 500km roughly every 90 minutes.
In August 2023, I began a role in the research and development division of a large company, allowing me to exercise my broad knowledge of control and estimation theory. My primary task in this role is to research interesting ideas and algorithms in the estimation of dynamic bodies, before implementing those algorithms into a large codebase for other branches of the company to use. This role has given me the opportunity to further explore and test my knowledge in mathematics, physics, and computer theory. To date, I have implemented several algorithms which are currently being used in other internal projects.
Teaching
Toward the end of my undergraduate degrees, I found an affinity for control theory. I am fascinated by the application of abstract and unintuitive mathematics to real-world tangible problems, and how simply changing a couple of numbers slightly can mean the difference between a functional system and a broken one. During my final year, I was given the opportunity of class tutor for an honours/master's level control theory course called Advanced PID Control. Immediately, I fell in love with teaching, especially in control theory, where understanding is locked behind some very strange mathematics. The following year I began my PhD, but continued teaching until the end of 2021. During this time, I tutored fifteen courses between The University of Adelaide and UniSA, including courses up to Master's level. Theses courses mostly focused around control theory, but I have experience teaching programming and mechanical design.
In addition to tutoring, I have also lectured in a number of courses across the two aforementioned universities, again focused around control theory. One of the most interesting experiences during this time is when I lectured the UniSA course Advanced Control remotely to students in China. This presented challenges in not only virtual teaching, but also a substantial language and culture barrier.
Advanced Digital Control
My proudest teaching experience was in 2021 when I was given the opportunity of course coordination and lecturing for the Master's level course Advanced Digital Control at The University of Adelaide. Rather than recycling content from the previous year, I elected to begin from scratch. While this created a significant but self-imposed challenge, it paid off with my students greatly enjoying the course. I chose to teach the course with a practical real-world focus as opposed to many of the theory-heavy courses. Every lecture, assignment, and tutorial had some practical real-world problem to be solved using the theory learned.
My effort was rewarded at the end of the course, when anonymous surveys were sent out to students, asking them to rate my teaching and the course quality. These came back with an astonishing 6.9 out of 7, whereas the average engineering course would rate around 5 out of 7.