I am interested in using innovative optical magnetometry techniques to further develop practical real-world technology with a range of important applications. During the last decade, laboratory magnetometers have made magnetic measurements with sensitivities below 0.5 femtotestla (one hundred billionth of the Earth’s magnetic field). My work is focussed on bringing that sensitivity out of the lab and into applications such as medical imaging, geological surveying, archaeology and security, by developing the hardware and techniques to make reliable, portable optical magnetometers. This work is funded by the UK’s National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Metrology (http://quantumsensors.org/)