texas_tiger asks:

[lederhosen]

1) Where are you from and is that where you're currently living? If not, why not?

California, or Canberra, depending on what you count. I was born in Mountain View (near San Jose), because my parents, both Australians, were working/studying over there at the time; they also thought it might be useful for me to have dual citizenship, so they made sure to be in the USA when I was due.

Then they moved back to Canberra, where I grew up - I was there from age 3ish to 21, when I finished my BSc. After a four-month working vacation in the USA, I came back to Canberra briefly and then moved to Sydney, because that's where my PhD was (more on that below).

2) Why optics? And while you're at it, could you explain what it is you actually do in three sentences or less?

I did my BSc mostly in mathematics, and after that I wanted a bit of a change - I wanted to do something more applied, but still using maths. A friend of the family put me in touch with a guy in biomedical engineering, I expressed an interest, visited UNSW's school of biomed eng, and they told me "we have funding for a PhD on this project". It looked interesting, and maths-related, so I took it on.

What I actually do: Mathematical approaches to designing contact lenses - my PhD project was about producing a model that would predict whether a given design would cause certain health problems, without having to manufacture it and try it on patients first. So far, there's actually been very little optics involved - most of my work's been concerned with how the lens physically interacts with the surface of the eye - although I'm doing more optics now. I also give miscellaneous mathematical/physics help to anybody who wanders through the office door.

Unfortunately, most of the details of what I'm doing are commercial-in-confidence, but WO2004097502 will give some idea of what I did for my PhD. It's rather more than three sentences, though, and in lawyerspeak.

3) As a sort of quid pro quo on your question, what kind of music turns you on? What sort do you avoid like the plague?

I grew up in a household where we had classical music playing most of my waking hours, and very little else. About the only rock/pop my parents had were a couple of early Beatles records that only got played if my brother or I picked them. I didn't really discover non-classical music until I was around 16.

The result of this is that I find it hard to listen to classical music these days; it's not that I avoid or dislike it, but I just instinctively tune it out, especially if it's something that was played a lot at home. However, I do have some lingering classical sensibilities, and I've noticed that the modern music I like often comes from artists who had classical training themselves - it seems to add a degree of depth to it.

Beyond that, I'm pretty eclectic genre-wise; just about every major genre shows up somewhere in my collection. I lean towards the melancholy stuff - Leonard Cohen, Peter Gabriel, that sort of thing - but if I want something with more energy, I'll go for fast not-too-wanky metal. The one thing that really turns me off is 'insipid' - generic love songs have to have something *very* good to make it worth my while. (Celine Dion annoys me greatly.)

I have a soft spot for things that break expectations - LPN singing bouncy swing songs about death and destruction, for instance. All in all, though, the artist who can probably get the biggest emotional reaction out of me is Peter Gabriel.

4) Why are you so interested in the Irish?

Well, my mother's side of the family are from Ireland (some generations back, now), but I'll confess that there was a lot of "couldn't think of another question so picked something from your user page" in that one ;-)

5) Rock, paper, or scissors? Why?

Scissors, because they have moving parts.