Profile

I am originally from Canberra, Australia and moved to the UK a year and a half ago for work. Up until I moved here, I had never traveled to Europe before. I now live in Cambridge with my partner who is also from Australia. In my spare time I love reading books (especially detective stories), watching sci fi tv shows and movies, and traveling. In the last 14 months I have traveled to 8 different European countries and I have plans to visit another 3 plus the US before the end of the year.

I spend most of my time investigating patterns and causes of diseases such as heart disease. The main project I am currently working on involves using lots of big datasests to find ways of predicting who is mostly likely to develop heart disease in the future. This sounds a little bit like gazing into a crystal ball but it’s not! What we actually do is use information from lots of different people (thousands and sometimes millions of people) about their lifestyles, behaviours and diseases. We can then use statistical methods to help understand the link between different lifestyles and behaviors (such as how much you exercise) and how likely you are to develop heart disease.

I like to work earlier in the day so my typical work day starts between 7:45 and 8 AM. I do research that involves analysing really big datasets but I don’t work in a lab. This means that I spend most of my day at my desk working on a computer. A couple of times a week I meet with other people to discuss projects we are working on. I am lucky that I get to work on lots of different projects so the exact thing I do each day is varied. In a typical day I would spend a lot of time writing code to run statistical analyses and I would spend my remaining time writing science papers and reading.