Today (4th Jan) Daniel Mac Manus submitted his PhD thesis – a great way to start 2023! Daniel has been working on his thesis research for a little under 4 years, which has involved some strong collaboration with our industry partners from Transpower New Zealand. The upshot of that was a recent paper in AGU’s Space Weather journal, looking at the likely impact of an extreme geomagnetic storm on the NZ electrical transmission network. After a few days reset Daniel will start a publication bursary, turning a chapter of his thesis into a scientific paper. We hope that will also be a very interesting work, as it involved us travelling to Wellington to use the Transpower control room simulator to build a practical mitigation switching plan (to decrease geomagnetically induced currents at “hot spot” transformers while keeping the network stable and able to deliver power). Well done Daniel for all this fine work!
Above: Daniel ringing the University of Otago bell, a tradition for PhD student submissions
