Rob Welch

That is the question. A look at using bleeding-edge simulation techniques to understand the inhibition behaviour of Myosin-VII. I gave this presentation as part of my undergraduate final project in early 2016. It’s aimed at people who are familiar with basic physics concepts, but not biology or biophysics. You can find more technical information about the project here.

Myosin-VII is part of the Myosin family of motor proteins. It has a key role in the operation of biological structures in the eye and inner ear. Unfortunately, the dynamics of Myosin-VII and its inhibition are poorly-understood. This article details my use of FFEA (Fluctuating Finite Element Analysis), a coarse-grained continuum simulation package, to model the motion of Myosin-VII, and understand its inhibition behaviour.

As you probably know, halogen light bulbs are incandescent: they produce light as a side effect of being heated up. Conversely, LEDs are semiconductor devices, and prolonged heat can be very damaging to them. LED devices tend to be cooled in a similar way to computer CPUs – using a thermal interface (like thermal paste) a heatsink, and sometimes a fan as well. However, the effectiveness of these cooling methods can vary wildly, depending on the operational limits of the LED and the type of thermal interface being used. In this article, I’ll discuss the experimental methods I designed to characterise the thermal performance of LEDs using a variety of cooling methods.

One of my responsibilities at Sharp was testing and analysing the type and quality of light produced by LED devices using an integrating sphere. I developed a graphical tool in Python that would automatically interpret spectral power distributions, read metadata from files, compute a large variety of colour metrics, and automatically generate PDF reports.

Sweet Dreams is the second demo area for Lawyer Guy: Defender of Justice, an action-platformer set to be released sometime. This article contains a detailed analysis of a number of game design topics relevant to this level, such as enemy design, tutorialisation, emergent gameplay, and one very infamous bug.

A short story I wrote in 2015 that can be loosely classified as speculative fiction. The story is about a man who sells his memories for money. You can also find this story on Reddit’s ‘nosleep’ forum.

I gave this presentation at the STFC in Harwell and at ARUP in London as part of the Engineering Development Trust’s ‘Future Industry Leaders Award’ competition. Although I didn’t win, I was offered a job as a result, which makes me feel better about not winning. This presentation focuses on how to design user experiences (UX) for highly technical websites, and why it’s important to do so.

The North Side is the first test area for Lawyer Guy: Defender of Justice, an action-platformer set to be released sometime. I started developing Lawyer Guy in around 2008 as a joke, abandoned it for around 6 years, then started working on it again in late 2014. This article is about the design and implementation of The North Side – being the first playable area, it took quite a lot of work.

The Bohr Magneton is a physical constant which is used to express the dipole moment of electrons. It corresponds to the angular momentum of an electron in the lowest orbital. The Bohr Magneton relates the splitting of atomic energy levels to the strength of an applied magnetic field. The Zeeman effect offers us an easy way to observe this splitting. In this lab report, I discuss a how to observe the Zeeman effect, and how it can be used to compute an accurate value for the Bohr Magneton.

A random walk (sometimes called ‘the drunkard’s walk’ describes the motion of a particle that undergoes a series of random steps. But what happens if that particle is a quantum particle? This article presents a few interesting ways of visualising this motion, using Python and matplotlib.