{"id":949,"date":"2020-10-12T07:36:38","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T07:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/?p=949"},"modified":"2020-10-28T14:52:27","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T14:52:27","slug":"sirvan-almasi-research-postgraduate-department-of-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/2020\/10\/12\/sirvan-almasi-research-postgraduate-department-of-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sirvan Almasi, Research Postgraduate, Department of Computing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h3>\n

\u201cBeing involved in the army reserves during the pandemic has meant that I\u2019ve been able to give back to London and the\u00a0community where I live.\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I am a PhD student in the\u00a0Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering<\/a>\u00a0and a member of the Army Reserves. I joined Imperial when I began my PhD in 2018. After my\u00a0Master\u2019s, I worked in finance for a short while before deciding that I wanted a change in career. I knew I wanted to return to academic research but\u00a0also wanted to\u00a0maintain my interest in finance and management, and now my PhD in blockchain identity systems and information security combines\u00a0both\u00a0these interests.<\/p>\n

I joined the Army Reserves at the end of 2018 with no prior military experience.\u00a0I decided\u00a0to go\u00a0for\u00a0officer\u00a0training and went on to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst,\u00a0where I\u00a0commissioned in 2019. It has been an extremely rich experience that I would highly recommend.<\/p>\n

As a\u00a0troop\u00a0commander in the Royal Signals, I am responsible for leading professional and technical soldiers in providing communications. Since the COVID-19 pandemic,\u00a0our\u00a0troop has been\u00a0producing face shields using\u00a03D printers\u00a0for local care homes and St John Ambulance.\u00a0We\u2019ve produced over 5,000 face shields since we started and we\u2019re aiming to have finished 6,500 by mid-August. Our work has been incredibly important. We have seen people using the shields we\u2019ve made\u00a0and have received several thank you letters from the\u00a0organisations\u00a0we have helped. The entire process has been really rewarding.<\/p>\n

The nature of my PhD means that it hasn\u2019t been too impacted by the pandemic, as all I need to do my work is my laptop! This has been a real bonus as I can go down to the\u00a0Army\u00a0Reserve Centre for my shifts once a week and work on my research while keeping an eye on the production line. It\u2019s been a huge effort from the entire\u00a0troop and it\u2019s certainly nothing that could have been done individually. Being involved in the Army Reserves during the pandemic has meant that I\u2019ve been able to give back to London and\u00a0my local community<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBeing involved in the army reserves during the pandemic has meant that I\u2019ve been able to give back to London and the\u00a0community where I live.\u201d I am a PhD student in the\u00a0Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering\u00a0and a member of the Army Reserves. I joined Imperial when I began my PhD in 2018. After my\u00a0Master\u2019s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1505,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-students"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1505"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":966,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}