The Biafran-war ciphers
With George Lasry and Frode Weierud. Breaking telex ciphers used during the 1967–1970 Nigerian civil war, including traffic on the Biafra–Lisbon diplomatic link. Fifty-year-old messages read for the first time.
Dedicated explainers for longer-running strands of my research.
These pages give a plain-English summary of individual projects, with links to the peer-reviewed papers, the conference talks, and any accompanying media. They are intended for readers who arrive from a search engine or a news article and want a one-stop overview.
With George Lasry and Frode Weierud. Breaking telex ciphers used during the 1967–1970 Nigerian civil war, including traffic on the Biafra–Lisbon diplomatic link. Fifty-year-old messages read for the first time.
With Sarah Lang and Megan Piorko. Solving an alchemical cipher in a sixteenth-century notebook shared by John Dee and his son Arthur Dee. Published at HistoCrypt 2022.
With Corinna Gannon and Sarah Lang. Deciphering the inscription engraved around the lip of a seventeenth-century handbell attributed to Emperor Rudolf II’s alchemical circle. Published at HistoCrypt 2023.
With Louie Helm. New world records for the shortest known Playfair cipher solutions, and the methods used to find them. Published at HistoCrypt 2025.
Continuing cryptanalysis of the as-yet-unsolved fourth panel (K4) of Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters. See the dedicated subdomain and the HistoCrypt 2021 paper.
Winner of the IEEE-CIS Predict+Optimize Technical Challenge. A combined forecasting and scheduling pipeline for the Monash University microgrid, published at AUPEC 2022. Full paper list under Publications.
Two 2020 papers (in Energies and in PES ISGT) investigating how Queensland residential load changed during the pandemic and how peer-to-peer batteries can keep critical medical devices powered through outages.
Multi-year work with the University of Queensland and collaborators on weather, topography and gender in public bike-sharing schemes. Primary outputs in Transport Reviews, Journal of Transport Geography and The Conversation.