Joshua Wiggs

Joshua Wiggs

PhD Student at Lancaster University

Teaching

Co-supervisor: Modelling Jupiter’s Magnetosphere

Summer Internship, Lancaster University, Physics Department, 2021

A 6 week long summer project undertaken by a third year undergraduate student at Lancaster University and jointly supervised by myself and Chris Arridge. Over the course of the project, the student developed their understanding of general plasma physics, numerical simulation techniques and programming in c++. After this the student was provided with access to the complete c++ codebase of JERICHO (a kinetic-ion, fluid-electron hybrid plasma model for the outer planets). The student initially re-enforced their understanding of how to operate the model by setting up a series of single particle drift motion tests and comparing them to their analytic solutions. Work then progressed to the analysis of well-defined instabilities, the one selected for this work was the well-known Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The student constructed initial model configurations that were conducive to the developed of the desired physical effect and the comparison of the results obtained to parameters obtained from analytic theory.

Co-supervisor: Simulations of Jupiter’s Magnetosphere

Summer Internship, Lancaster University, Physics Department, 2020

A 6 week long summer project undertaken by a second year undergraduate student at Lancaster University and jointly supervised by myself and Chris Arridge. Over the course of the project, the student developed their understanding of general plasma physics and numerical simulation techniques, before being given access to the complete Python codebase of JERICHO (a kinetic-ion, fluid-electron hybrid plasma model for the outer planets). Work was performed using the simulation code to verify the outputs from it reflected those observed in real plasmas, this was done by comparing the drift motions of particles in a variety of set-ups against their analytical solutions. Additionally, analysis of the conservations of fundamental physical properties was performed on the models boundaries to ensure that these were behaving as expected. The project culminated in the student prototyping and implementing a pressure solver that could be incorporated into JERICHO’s codebase.

Postgraduate Teaching Assisant 2018-2022

Undergraduate laboratories & courses, Lancaster University, Physics Department, 2018

During my PhD studies at Lancaster University, I also possessed the role of Postgraduate Teaching Assistant (PGTA), engaging and participating in the delivery and grading of a number of different undergraduate courses (modules). The primary set of courses that I assisted with was first year practical laboratories (PHYS133-135), in which I was a demonstrator, guiding students on a weekly basis through a range of up to 16 experiments simultaneously, and marked (graded) a number of student’s laboratory books, documenting their progress through the experiment. Additionally, I marked formal written assessments for these courses in the form of complete laboratory reports as well as shorter written analyses of experiments.