I am Dr Sajid Saleem.
I completed my PhD at University College London, researching superconducting nanoelectronics in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, working at the London Centre for Nanotechnology. My thesis received my department’s prize for best thesis of the year, and I stayed on at the London Centre for Nanotechnology as a postdoctoral researcher. I have co-authored a number of peer-reviewed papers.
I first taught at university level in 2002. Since then I have taught engineering subjects grounded in physics and mathematics — electronic engineering, control engineering and quantum mechanics — at universities in Pakistan. I have worked as an Assistant and then Associate Professor, as founding head of an electrical engineering department, and as a research director. I have taught first-year undergraduates struggling with mechanics and final-year students designing their own systems, taught at postgraduate level, and supervised PhD students to completion.
Physics as it’s actually used
My career has run on two tracks. Alongside teaching, I have spent it in engineering and research — as founding director of a systems engineering organisation, and before that as a naval engineer responsible for systems that had to work at sea rather than on paper.
This matters more at A-Level than it sounds. Physics taught only from a textbook becomes a set of problems with tidy answers and no consequences. I can tell a student what a capacitor is actually for, why anyone cares about resonance, and what happens when the calculation is wrong in a real system. Students remember physics that means something, and they lose fewer marks on it.
Why I teach
I have spent most of my career watching students arrive at university with good grades and shaky foundations — able to reproduce a method, unable to say why it works. A-Level is where that divide opens, and it is where it can still be closed.
I have watched too many students arrive at engineering degrees underprepared. It is easier to fix that at seventeen than at twenty.