What is your name?

Cuán de Barra

What subjects did you take in school/college and how have these influenced your career path?

Secondary School (2010-2016)

Interested in science in secondary school and knew I wanted to do science or engineering in University. For leaving certificate I took:

• Applied Maths
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Economics

These are all quite mathsy subjects but to be honest I sort of took a gamble with physics over biology/chemistry as going into the LC I liked them all equally but I knew that taking higher level maths, applied maths, and physics would all complement each other. These three quickly became my favourite subjects and I put Physics in UCD as the first choice on my CAO.

Just a quick note for the LC students: You don’t have to do a particular science for the leaving cert to study it in college. i.e. you don’t have to have done chemistry in school to do it in college. BUT it does help if you have already studied it before, your workload will be lighter. Personally I thought that Applied maths really helped my college level physics as a lot of the content you cover in  your first year more resembles Applied Maths than physics but it is not at all necessary.

Undergraduate Degree: Physics with Space Science & Astronomy (2016-2020)

When you enter UCD science you can take any of the sciences from scratch (Physics/Maths, Chemistry, Biology) but I knew I only wanted to do Physics so I only took maths and physics modules. I specifically wanted to to focus on Space and Astronomy just because it caught my imagination the most as well as this UCD had a good space research reputation which became even more apparent when the EIRSAT-1 project kicked off in the second half of my degree. What also drew me in is the final project.

The final year project (i.e. your “thesis”) is a trip to Calar Alto observatory in the South of Spain where you choose an astronomical object to study over the course of a week with the large dome telescopes there. These objects could be exoplanets, binary star systems with two stars orbiting each other, comets, the remains of supernovae – you could chose anything as long as there was a science question to answer. My project was about studying a type of star called Cepheids (“Sef-heeds”) that pulse periodically which can indirectly tell us the distance to these stars in distant galaxies.

Masters Degree: Space Science & Technology (2021-2022)

I took a year out due to Covid (I actually started a different masters course in 2020 based in Spain but left the course as I wasn’t enjoying it and Covid meant a lot of the travel and benefits of study aboard were impossible). I took the Space Science and Technology masters as it covered many aspects of space and the space industry: astronomy, electronics, satellite experiments, programming etc. You could focus on whatever you were interested in and there was also an emphasis on industry skills and jobs in the space sector.

As part of the course there was a few big projects:

• We designed and built a mini “satellite” with experiments and launched it on a balloon from Northern Ireland. We tracked and recovered it after it reached a height of 30km (three times higher than planes fly!)
• We did an collaborative project with the University of Southampton and the University of La Laguna in Tenerife. We travelled to Tenerife for a week and designed a space mission with the other students.
• I did an internship with the European Space Agency based in Madrid for 6 months working with data from a satellite called Gaia whose job is to map all the known stars in the sky.

PhD and EIRSAT-1 (2023-Present)

I’m currently a PhD student in UCD and my work involves building a detector to study the gamma radiation emitted when black holes are created. This detector will fly on a satellite that will launch in 2027. I chose to do a PhD because the project was something that really interested me and appealed to my skillset that I had developed in the masters including software. And I would get to work with black holes! I became aware of the project by getting to know my professors and their work and discussing future work with them. As part of the PhD I have had opportunities to travel all over the world to do courses and present my work including Washington DC, Delaware, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

As part of my PhD I currently also work for NASA, on a mission called Fermi which studies gamma-rays too.

Alongside this work I am also a spacecraft operator for EIRSAT-1 (Ireland’s first satellite). My job is to talk to the satellite as it passes over Ireland, check it is working, fix any problems onboard, and analyse the data we can download from the spacecraft. I was very keen to get involved with such an important project for the Irish space sector and the mission has been going really well. In fact recently we detected our first gamma-ray burst which occurs when stars turn into black holes.

What’s next?

Not sure yet.  I still have 2 and a half years of PhD but I think I would like to stay working with gamma-rays and satellites but whether that is with research or with industry I don’t know yet!