Biography

Who are you?

I study physics at the University of Copenhagen, where I started the summer of 2007. I finished my bachelors degree in February 2011, and am now in the process of getting my PhD degree.

Me

What did you do before?

I am originally from the small city of Holstebro, in Jutland, Denmark. I passed my mathematical line of the Danish gymnasium (something like high school), with maths, physics and chemistry on highest levels. Before that, I studied woodworks at a boarding school for a year.

What are your interests?

I really love working with computers, and actually considered studying computer science instead of physics. However, I made up my mind on physics, and now simply use my computer a little more excessively.

In the gymnasium, I mostly worked with physics as well (the computer science course wasn't really what I wanted), and I got a grade of 13 (I guess that corresponds to an A+) for my SSO assigment, a large written project done in the last of the three years. I wrote about a magnetic optical trap (MOT), in connection to an experiment done at the H.C. Ørsted institute (you can find this project under the Documents section of this page, but it is in Danish).

Not counting the computers and the physics, I also have a large interest in photography. I've bought myself a D-SLR camera, and I primarily work with macro photography. If you want to see some of the work I've done, you can take a look at my DeviantArt profile or my facebook photography page. Below are links to some of my more popular photos on DeviantArt:

Below this you can also see a selection of my latest uploads to my Instagram account @PJRayPhotography, which is where I am the most active at the moment:

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What can you do?

As interested in computers as I am, I have of course by now learned to use a lot of different programming languages and programs. To mention a few (a full list can be seen on my resume):

Further, I regularly use both Windows and Linux, where the last distributions I've used were Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and Arch Linux. I also set up web pages (this page is an example). I've made a web page for the company of a mother of one of my gymnasium friends (yeah, a little far-fetched). I also work on setting up wiki- and educational systems for both neutron scattering (the Virtual Neutrons for Scattering projektet and the wiki) and introductory experimental physics courses at the university (EFwiki (in Danish)).

Then, what about the physics?

I don't really have any special gifts for doing physics, I am just really interested in it, and by nature I am very curious - and well, I simply love learning new things about the world I live in.

I chose to study "pure" physics, since I don't really have any interest in messing with geophysics, biophysics or astophysics - they simply don't catch my interest. Actually I have a small dream of becoming a scientist in some very basic physics, but I still don't have any idea what it should be. I hope I'll figure it out someday. For now, I'm concentrating on condensed matter physics and scattering, and it has so far proven to be interesting.