For the last 21 months, I’ve been working at one of the leading research institutions in the UK; a place where electrons are accelerated close to the speed of light, which creates spectacularly bright light over a wide range of wavelengths. This light is then fired at samples to learn everything there is to know about them from a molecular level up. Diamond Light Source is seriously impressive:

People can do awesome things

Walking around the inside of Diamond for the first time is special. The whole place is covered in pipes, and wires, and connectors. There is steam firing out of holes, bright LED warning signs, and huge, solid looking cannisters with strange chemical names printed in bold lettering. When you manage to peek inside one of the experimental hutches - where the science happens - everything becomes very shiny and incredibly intricate. Everything is centred around a thin pipe which protrudes from one end of the room and will carry high energy photons to their destination. There are racks upon racks of computers, robots which can be controlled from the other side of the worlds, and very expensive detectors.

Having worked on building sites and tried to wire up small electronics projects, the sheer amount of cabling and connections that have all been designed and connected properly is staggering. The level of organisation and attention to detail involved in building and operating such a terrifically complex device is hard to comprehend. Clearly, Diamond was not built in an afternoon, or even with a few weeks of very hard work! It was built by thousands of engineers, scientists, technicians and many others over two decades. It’s still being built and improved! Diamond is a testament to what can be done by people working passionately and skilfully towards a common goal.

It is possible to do software well

Software is a slightly strange technical field, in that many people working at a high level didn’t have a “formal training” - usually referring to a 3/4 year degree in Computer Science or something similar. I am one of those people, and for a long time I used software as a tool for getting the things I wanted done: turning on and off an LED at a controllable rate is a favourite!

Because I was programming embedded devices, I learnt C. And I learnt C within the context of Atmel Studio. There are many restrictions in what you can do with software on embedded devices and they can be a good way to get to know the hardware. However, the tooling surrounding them is… less than modern.

During my time at Diamond I was introduced to a wealth of software engineering practices with many acronyms. But what it boils down to is that there are now tools and systems available which can really help you to get your software working properly. Other tools and systems can monitor your software, replicate it, and restart it if it breaks.

Nobody knows everything

Given the complexity and challenges I have described already, you might not be surprised to learn that there is no single person at Diamond who knows about every detail of the machine and auxilliary components as well as the experts.

My first few meetings at Diamond were a bit daunting, as there seemed to be a never ending stream of acronyms and everyone, apart from me, was nodding along. However, there are so many different areas to become an expert in at Diamond that as soon as you step beyond outside any immediate team, it’s clear that there is a whole other world of knowledge to learn about. Indeed, Diamond is very special as an organisation, in that it is both horizontally and vertically integrated. Some particular purchases and services are outsourced, but the vast majority of what makes Diamond work is made and done at Diamond. Everything from welding, to accounting, to devices which suspend samples in mid air with soundwaves, to the high performance computing clusters, to the PCBs which measure the power flowing through the magnets, to the podcasts.

Working at Diamond is a study on collaborating with people who know more about a specific thing than you are ever likely to. It challenges you to be sympathetic to others, both to try and see the problem from their vantage point, and to explain what you are seeing to them.

The graduate program I have been working on involved quarterly rotations on different teams for one year, followed by a longer term placement in the second year. This requires quickly familiarising yourself with a new team, new knowledge and a new goal. As a graduate, you tend to have less day-to-day work, so can throw yourself in the deep end of your placements. In time, you become an expert yourself! People begin looking to you for explanations of things that they don’t understand.

Where am I going?

From August, I will be working at Oxford Nanopore Technology, trying to make the world a better place by contributing to their VolTRAX device. VolTRAX is designed to automate sample preparation, making it easier to turn raw samples into something which can be sequenced. Sequenced as in: read the whole genome sequence, by feeding the sample through a tiny hole in an especially shaped molecular structure while passing an electrical signal across the gap, and measuring the differences induced by the different genome bases as they travel through. This is not easy.

Here’s a video to turn the jargon into images:

This is a really exciting step for me. ONT’s devices have been to the middle of jungles, the arctic and into space on the ISS. I’m hoping I can be an important part of their journey and, by doing so, aid genomic research in hard to reach places.

Thanks to everyone who helped me during my time at Diamond :D