Glasgow Science Centre
I worked at Glasgow Science Centre from December 1999 to July 2004. My work at GSC has a page to itself.
Carbrae Energy Consultants
For a few months after finishing my MSc, I worked with Carbrae Energy Consultants of Glasgow, assisting on a number of projects mainly concerned with building services.
Teaching Fellow, Stirling University
During the first semester of my MSc, I was employed part-time by the Psychology Department at Stirling University to continue to teach the undergraduate course on Perception that I developed and taught while I was a Lecturer there. I also wrote and delivered 4 first-year lectures on statistics.
Lecturer, Stirling University
From to 1991 to 1998 I was a Lecturer in the Psychology department at Stirling University. I carried out research in into human vision using the techniques of visual psychophysics. My main research interests were spatial vision and colour vision, and I also did some work on statistical aspects of colour vision testing and on the quality of umpires' leg-before-wicket decisions in cricket.
My main teaching responsibility was the undergraduate unit on Perception. Having taken the course over from my predecessor, I built a new course from scratch. The course mainly covered vision and hearing, with a small amount of material on smell and taste. Psychology students generally find Perception a difficult and technical subject. I went to a lot of trouble to try to bring the subject alive for them, mainly by including as many live demonstrations as I could in my lectures. I seem to have had some success because many students appeared to be pleasantly surprised by the course.
My other teaching jobs included some lectures on vision for an MSc in Neural Computation, some first-year perception lectures, and second-year tutorials.
Like other lecturers, I was Adviser of Studies for many students. I sat on the department's Teaching Committee.
Why did I leave? Although I enjoyed my teaching, and felt I was doing a good job, my research work was going less well. I really wasn't very interested in the results of my experiments, and that's no way to be when you are trying to do something as difficult and laborious as research. In the end I realised that I could tread water in my sheltered, well-paid, but unsatisfactory job for the next thirty years until I retired, or I could take a chance on something new. I decided to take the chance, and I haven't regretted it.
Research Fellow, Keele University
I was a post-doc in the Pepartment of Communication and Neuroscience at Keele with Professor David Foster. I worked on an SERC-funded project concerned with colour vision, in particular, our ability to make visual judgments about the spectral reflectance properties of surfaces in varying conditions of illumination. I also did some work on statistical aspects of perceptual psychophysics. I enjoyed my work at Keele, and enjoyed playing for the Keele RATS cricket team too.
Industrial Student, British Gas Engineering Research Station
Between leaving school in December 1980 and going to University in October 1981, I worked for British Gas in Newcastle upon Tyne. I worked on a project concerning the damage caused to cast-iron gas pipes by subsidence induced by tunnelling or excavation. This involved a lot of computer programming, and a little surveying. If you're reading this, Dave Casson or Les Hinsley, thanks - I look back upon my time at ERS with great fondness.