I completed my physics undergraduate and masters studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, where I started my PhD in ALICE in 2025 through iThemba LABS. In my second year of PhD I was accepted for the CERN-STFC Non-Member State Doctoral Student Programme to spend a year at CERN under the supervision of Fabrizio Grosa.

My PhD project is on the measurement of exclusive open heavy-flavour hadrons at forward rapidity via the semi-leptonic decay channel. The project aims to make use of the improved pointing resolution provided by the MFT to discriminate between muons of different sources. Normally this separation is done with a pt-binned DCA template fit. We will perform this analysis, and then assess the feasibility of using machine learning instead.

Other than this, my service task is on MFT-MCH-MID track matching in the muon spectrometer. This involves quality assurance and development of machine learning methods to compete with the classical chi2-based approach for track matching.

Outside my work I enjoy video games, history, and reading obscure Wikipedia articles.