Benjamin Price

I design experimental systems end to end — the fixturing that holds the test article, the drive and diagnostics, the motion and acquisition that collect the data, and the analysis that turns it into a defensible result. When the instrument does not exist yet, I build it.

The other half of the job is saying what the data means. I spent nine months coordinating customer-sponsored R&D for aerospace and defence organisations — running weekly technical meetings, owning biweekly and monthly reports, and translating programme objectives into experiments, work assignments and deliverables.

My doctoral research at the University of Washington is on atmospheric-pressure surface dielectric barrier discharge actuators: devices that move air with no moving parts. It is a useful proving ground precisely because almost everything about the measurement is hostile — kilovolt drive noise, forces measured in micronewtons, and a discharge that changes inside a single cycle.