Get to know me!
Hello! I’m Sam, although my whole family calls me Micci (pronounced like the Mickey in Mickey Mouse) thanks to an incident with a babygrow that had a hood with ears…That’s all I know, as I’ve been Micci since before I can remember!
I was a rather cute child! And I still have my dad’s chin!
I was born in Cape Town, South Africa and I lived there for the first 23 years of my life. My first ever big move was halfway across the world, to Bath UK, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
I have an older sister who is a force of nature! Although I got a few good shots in during our childhood, she’ll attest to my sharp teef as I did bite her once…or maybe twice…actually it may have been three times…
I believe this may have been my first day of school.
My dad bought me this teddy. I very originally named her, Teddy, and she still sits on my dresser even at the ripe old age of 20-something-more-than-7.
My sister and I had the most amazing childhood. We were encouraged to be outside as much as possible and were incredibly lucky to have a large piece of land in the Tanqua Karoo and this is where we spent most of our weekends and holidays, running around in the sun, cycling our bikes, occasionally crashing into fences, riding ponies, playing with cats, dogs, horses, goats and sheep, and in my case, almost being unalived by a Puff adder…Luckily I don’t remember that specific experience.
Fancy dress competition on our pony Dukie - a Teddy Bear’s picnic with Mommy Baker.
*Spot Teddy!
Towards the end of high school (I went to an all-girls school), I realised that I actually had no idea what I wanted to do, and even less idea what I should study. Luckily, the University of Cape Town has an annual Open Day event, so off I went with Mommy in tow. Unbeknownst to me, before our leaving the house, my dad had said to my mom, “Take her to Engineering!”.
So she gently herded me towards the Engineering Department and the first time we saw was a group of students working on a Formula-style car. Cars are not and never have been my thing, though these days I have more of an appreciation for them. I distinctly remember rolling my eyes and sighing. Luckily, Mommy Baker is not a pushover, and so on we went.
We ended up at the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) Lab where I met Dr George Vicatos - Popular Mechanics Inventor of the Year, 2011. His exhibition included a model of the human torso with the majority of the right-hand joints and bones replaced by titanium implants. As I’d always had an interest in medicine, I was hooked. We spoke for 45mins and I came home set on Mechanical Engineering. Not even my grandmother asking why on earth I wanted to spend the rest of my life lying on a skateboard under a car could deter me.
So off I went to study Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. During my 4 years at UCT I made an amazing group of friends and I so enjoyed my degree, even though it was rather stressful at times! My friend Justin used to say, “Engineering is a team sport,” and this is advice I still give my own students today. UCT is also where I met the man who would later become my husband.
Despite following the traditional degree program, I did have the opportuntity to specialise somewhat in my final year by selecting an elective unit in Finite Element Analysis and a final year project investigating the mechanisms of machining 5mm diameter samples of cortical bone and the subsequent compressive properties of these samples.
Me and Rhys on thesis submission day!
He is accidentally holding his thesis upside down…
If I could go back and do it again, I would choose the same degree at the same University. Absolutely no regrets!
Graduation was a very special day.
During my final few months of my degree, my mentor, Prof. Nurick, asked me what I wanted to do next. I sort of hummed and hawed and said something vague and noncomittal about the possibility of doing a Masters. He asked me to send him my CV and transcript and come see him the following week. When I went back to see him, he looked at me over his glasses and said, “I think you should do a PhD.” And before I knew it I had applied to 3 PhD programs in the UK and Ireland, and that’s how I met Tony Miles, who became my PhD supervisor here in Bath. Tony was instrumental in helping me obtain funding for my PhD as well as settling me in to Bath University and listening to all my anxiety PhD rambles!
I started my PhD in September 2019, 6 months before COVID (not that I could have ever imagined a global pandemic…) and joined an office of the most lovely people I have ever met. I’m still in touch with all of them and couldn’t have survived moving away from everything I’d ever known without them.
My PhD topic was in Biomechanics, specifically investigating the mechanical factors affecting lower back pain and evaluating different methods of modelling spinal behaviour. PhD was nothing like anything I’ve ever done. It is the equivalent of being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool having never dipped a toe in water before. Your supervisors are the lifeguards there to make sure you don’t drown, but a large part of their job is ensuring that you learn how to swim by yourself. I learnt so much during my PhD, not only about biomechanics and the Engineering side of things, but also about myself and what I’m actually capable of when I put my mind to it.
COVID presented an additional challenge as for 6 months, I had to work on my largely experimental PhD project remotely with no access to my lab… This required some re-jigging of the project scope and the inclusion of some new computational elements, but it all turned out alright in the end! Specifically because, I had amazing family friends in Melksham, who I just happened to be spending a week with when lockdown came in. I lived with them for 6 months and gained a set of parents, Jannie and Runel! Their kitchen is where I learnt how to bake sourdough, and got properly into my baking!
The iconic blue door of 1 Place Road, Melksham.
In fact, I can distinctly remember the day it all started. It was Sunday the 19th April and I was moping around the house in Place Road, feeling sorry for myself. No access to my lab, no access to my office, no access to my friends, boohoo woe is me… Runel spied me being all pathetic, went into the other room and came back with a recipe book which she plonked in front of me (rather dramatically, I might add), pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips, and said, “Bake something!”. So I did, and I haven’t really stopped since!
The Challah that started it all!
I learnt and did so many new things while I was living with Jannie and Runel, including jam making, crabapple jelly making, cycling along the canal, making handmade birthday cards, and even running a half marathon all by myself! My Afrikaans also improved, although that is maybe a strong term… I learnt so much that Runel often referred to my time with them as my ‘finishing school’, so when it was finally time for me to move back to Bath in August 2020, I collated a scrapbook of my time with them and all the things we’d done, and I called it my Corona Diploma.
The scrapbook is now somewhere in South Africa with Jannie and Runel, but here is my signed degree certificate!
Despite the fact that Jannie and Runel, and their daughter Mandie (my adopted big sister), her husband Jimmy, and their daughter Cailyn (my adopted baby sister) now live in South Africa, we are still in touch and they will forever be some of the most special people in my life!
After the end of 2020, life mostly carried on as normal, despite the few odd viral hiccups, and I was able to continue my research and get my degree! This meant I could then both greet my dad, who is a dentist, as Dr Hayward, and introduce myself as Dr Hayward, which according to him was really only funny the first time…
Both my parents travelled to Bath for my PhD graduation, which happened in the Bath Abbey! An absolutely gorgeous venue!
Another specific challenge posed by COVID was the widened gulf between me and my then boyfriend, Rhys. When I accepted the PhD, we’d only been together about a year, a large portion of which we had done long distance, seeing each other once a month or so while he was working in Joburg and I was teaching at UCT in Cape Town. When I planned to move to Bath, we had a plan: We would carry on doing long distance, seeing each other 2/3 times a year, for the 3-4 years it would take me to finish my PhD. When lockdown started, that sorta ruined our plans and it got to the point where we hadn’t seen each other for 10 months with no end in sight. Given that I was stuck in a PhD for at least another 3 years, Rhys bowed to my strong recommendation that he look at jobs in the UK, and he moved over in October 2020. I picked him up from Heathrow and he came to stay with me for his 2 week quarantine before he was going to try find his own place in Bristol, closer to his office. He never left ❤️.
Rhys and I got married in June 2023.
He puts up with all my crazy and he’s my best friend.
Once I finished my PhD I did an 18month research postdoc at the Uni of Bath, still in the Mechanical Engineering department but this time working with 6 axis robotic arms and optimisation of robotic machining. It was a steep learning curve with lots of new challenges, but I loved it! In fact, I’m still involved in the ongoing research!
I did a lot of teaching during my PhD, partly to make some extra money (PhD stipend is very skint), but mostly because I genuinely love teaching. There’s something about guiding a student through a problem and watching the lights go on as they ‘get it’. I find it incredibly rewarding.
Somewhat ideal given that my current job is Lecturer at the University of Bath. Among other things, I teach Maths to the first year Engineering students and I love my job!
So here are some other fun things to know about me:
I love horses and horse-riding. I rode competitively until I was 16 and unfortunately now have neither the time nor the money to pursue it again. I enjoy running when my base fitness is at a reasonable level. I do not, however, enjoy the process of getting my base fitness up to a reasonable level… In 2023 Rhys and I ran the Bath Half marathon, raising funds for Genesis Trust in Bath, a charity that supports homeless and vulnerable people in the Bath area.
I also enjoy doing upside down calisthenics, playing tennis and collecting fun coins, which has become more challenging since people have stopped using cash. I also do silly things like hold pumpkins up in front of my face, all in pursuit of humour.
I’ve always loved being outdoors, probably largely to do with how I grew up! The house Rhys and I are renting currently is the first place I’ve lived in the UK that has a garden and we have been having so much fun growing things! My favourites are carrots and potatoes: they’re so much fun to harvest!
Obviously my main hobby is baking, but I do other things as well! I have been known to dabble in the art of flower arranging every now and again, and if you take me to a beach, I will collect shells and sea glass. I often make cute bird art from the latter! Sometimes I make art from random things like pressed bits and pieces from our wedding.
I also enjoy cross-stitch embroidery and various other dopamine fixes like drawing silly cartoons, arranging M&Ms in colour-coded patterns before eating them, or making hobbit door wreaths. Which reminds me, I am a massive J.R.R. Tolkien fan and am in a continuous loop of reading the books, watching the movies (not the Hobbit though, I have feelings about the Hobbit movies…use the contact form if you wish to argue or discuss), and/or listening to the audiobooks.
If you too are a massive Tolkien fan, I can highly recommend taking yourself to Stow-on-the-Wold, a beautiful small town in the English Cotswolds. In this town there is a church, the back door of which was said to be Tolkiens inspiration for Durin’s Door.
