Profile

When I was at school I liked most things – art, music, languages, science AND maths. I found it quite hard to choose what I wanted to do. Anything except sport really. Although I did enjoy making slime in science club in year 7 and entering the national cipher challenge in my last few years of school. I wasn’t so keen on the biology side of science so I dropped it after GCSE. I think I ended up working in this area more by accident than anything else, but I really enjoy doing work that can improve human health.

I did maths at university and in my final year when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do next, I was waiting for a tutor who was late and there was a flyer pinned to his board about a PhD in genetics. Reading it, I thought it sounded interesting and realised I could do that (even with a maths degree). During my PhD I taught myself to program and now that’s most of my work.

Over time viruses mutate and we can use these mutations to track how they have spread over time. When we combine this information with metadata such as date, location or history of the patient  it becomes a powerful way to answer questions about an infection such as whether it is spreading faster or causing more serious illness, where it was imported from. This can help us to take actions to bring an epidemic/outbreak under control.

Over the last couple of years a lot of my work was on SARs-CoV-2 and I was a part of the team who gave it labels and named variants. Now I am looking at avian influenza and poliovirus.

I have 2 small children aged 2.5 years and 11 months, so the start of the day is chaos as we get up, have breakfast and I take them to nursery. Some days I’ll pop home and walk the dog or run some errands, then I cycle in to work, getting there usually just a little after 9am. My work is entirely computer based, so there is a mixture of running pipelines/analysis, writing software, and reading for most of the day. We all try to stop for a coffee break in the department break out room at 11, and again for lunch. I leave at about 5pm and cycle back in time for my little ones tea, bath and bed. Sometimes I do a little more work after they have gone to bed, but more often than not it’s time to catch up on home life.