Profile

I love to play the guitar in the evenings after playing soccer with my 7 year old son. He wears me out he is so fit!. the guitar helps me relax for the evening. I work for a long time before I decided to go back to college to study. This was the best thing I ever done and now I have a brilliant job that I love very much. It’s not even like a job, it’s my hobby which I get paid for!

Most of my work is in reinforced concrete design. I design reservoirs that hold drinking water which is the distributed to all the houses in the area. To do this I also need to know how to design structures that sit on or a re buried in the ground. This is called Geotechnical Engineering. Both designs are related and we need to work on both at the same time. Working with the ground is very difficult as soil can change at different depth. To know what is below the ground, we drill holes called boreholes into the ground. the soil is pulled up to the surface then we can see what it is like. We can check how string the soil is with some tests in the laboratory.

Most of my work involves designing structures which are part of a larger project. There are many teams involved. There are design teams that look after the electrical items such as pumps and valves and control systems. Teams that look at pipework and the connections. My team look at the reinforced concrete design of the tanks. Some of these tanks can be as big as half a football pitch and can be as high as your house!. My job is to do the concrete design but I also lead all the the teams and bring the design together. This involves many calls to people and many meetings. It is fun because I get to chat a lot!. Teamwork is the most important part of being involved in designing a project, that way everyone gets their say and the project usually gets built correctly.

The model structures have a digital output where you can see the load being applied on the foundations. This information can be scaled up and used for the design of the bridge foundations.