Who got that job?

By STEVE HART

Were you one of the people who applied for this job and wondered who got it?

Tom Sors, senior research scientist, Phitek Systems

Tom Sors was widely travelled by the time he arrived at the University of Bristol to study physics in 1991. He was born in the Netherlands, moved to Britain as a baby, was educated in Belgium from age 10 and returned to Britain for university.

He moved to New Zealand in 2001 - a year after completing his PhD at the Institute of Sound and Vibration at the University of Southampton.

"My mother is Belgian and my father English," said Sors, 31, who left his research engineering job at a Crown Research Institute to join sound and acoustics company Phitek Systems.

The company is known for its work in developing flat speakers that are little more than 1cm deep, and for its noise-cancelling technology, commonly used in aircraft headphones. They cancel out the ambient noise so wearers can better enjoy inflight movies and music.

"Phiteck Systems is a young company and I had read about them a few times in the newspapers and so was attracted to apply for the job when I saw it advertised - I already knew quite a lot about the company," Sors said.

"My previous job at the Crown Research Institute was interesting, but I was keen to work in an organisation that was more commercially driven. The atmosphere here is good."

Tom Sors' job includes reviewing the company's products to identify ways of improving them scientifically and looking for new ways to use them.

"We use computers to simulate possible changes to our technologies which does away with the need to physically produce them," says Sors. "We see a future for our technologies mainly in the entertainment industry and consumer electronics. Products such as flat speakers are used a lot in computers."

Sors is a keen sportsman who has completed the Ironman triathlon twice in the past two years and took part in the London Marathon in 1997. He plays the piano, speaks French, and has helped to produce a dozen or so scientific papers - having written extensively on acoustics and vibration.