OLLIE NEBEL

A visit to the Science Museum's Cosmonauts exhibition in 2015 made an impression that stuck. Something about seeing the actual hardware - the suits, the capsules, the sheer scale of what people had built - made the whole thing feel real in a way it hadn't before.

I'm Ollie, a Year 12 student studying Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics at Caterham School. I'm drawn to the harder problems in aerospace and space systems - the kind where physics, engineering, and computation all have to work together. One area I've gone deep on is high-speed flight: I researched scramjet and ramjet propulsion, thermal protection systems, shock wave interactions, and boundary-layer instabilities, producing a technical report and later delivering a lecture on modelling hypersonic flow - taking an audience from the Navier-Stokes equations through to computational methods like DSMC. My aim is to study aerospace engineering at university - the questions are too interesting to stop now!