CV

When not wearing her Schrödinger's Kitten hat (complete with cute pointy ears), the kitten is known as Kate Oliver in formal publications, or Scary Boots for unserious work, and to her friends. While studying MSci physics at UCL, she became wrapped up in a number of extra-curricular societies, because quantum physics just isn't challenging enough.

One of the early members of The Cheese Grater Magazine — the only satirical, investigative and fairly independent publication at UCLU — she wrote a number of spoof articles and drew many, many cartoons during her four years on the paper. During this time, The Cheese Grater Magazine won the Guardian Student Media Award for Best Budget Publication in 2006 and (after that category was scrapped) was shortlisted for just plain Best Magazine in 2007, making the top five list despite only having a fortieth of the budget of some of its competitors (as the treasurer, Kate was painfully aware of this). She also contributed to the paper of the whole University of London, London Student, with lovely pieces on the truth about diamonds, STFC funding cuts, the quantum mechanics of smell and electricity-free refridgeration.

Having written a few articles specifically on spoof science, Kate submitted a couple of these to Null Hypothesis, who seemed to quite like them. On the strength of that, she wrote a few (slightly) more factual articles, and was invited to contribute to the Null Hypothesis Book, Defining Moments In Science. This worthy tome contains 1001 accessible accounts of key events, experiments, people, observations and theories in the last century of science. Of those 1001, Kate wrote 41, making her responsible for 4.1% of the book. Topics she wrote about include neutrino detection, measuring the universe, the Casimir effect, and the detonation of the first atom bomb — all explained for laymen in 250 words or less.

Having been paid for writing, Kate resolved to make this a habit, and so worked writing university guides for Push after graduating, cherry-pickin the relevant bits from researcher's reports and compiling them into oh-so-witty and succint profiles. Currently she is writing book reviews and features for The Sky At Night Magazine, but is also actively seeking other places to publish.