Profile

I live with my partner in Cambridge and work and teach at the University. I have no pets because my partner is allergic to fluff, but we do have a housemate called Rowena.  We live on the fens, which is flat, open countryside.

This is a picture of me and my partner play-fighting on the fens.

My favorite film is “The Favourite” and my favorite book is “Memory” by Lois McMaster Bujold.  In my free time, I like to crochet and do larp (live action roleplay games). I love the creativity that pretending to other characters allows me.

This is a picture of me at a LARP in Italy a few years ago – we were playing a game about what would happen if a really infectious disease started in a small isolated village. I was pretending an evil scientist, who was there to cover up that people were getting ill. The character realized that it was more important to find a cure than make money once she got sick too.

This is my current work-in-progress – a crocheted quilt.

I like to give talks about mathematics and statistics at schools. I made a game for schools called Pathogen. The game is about large outbreaks of diseases and how mathematics (and other skills) are needed to save people.

My pronouns are she/her and I have fibromyalgia. I use a wheelchair a couple of days a week.

This shows me out on a walk in Cornwall with my friend and her toddler.

I use statistics and large datasets to make predictions about what causes a disease.  For example, we see that a lot more people who smoke get cancer, so we predict that smoking makes you more likely to get cancer. That cause is well known, so I look at other potential causes and diseases.

I get to work between 9-10am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I only work 3 days due to my fibromyalgia and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I recover.
I read my emails and work out my priorities for the day. Sometimes I find information for other people in my group – this means I need to talk to them to work out what they want and then create a dataset containing it. Sometimes I take data for myself and use it to create a model of what causes a specific disease.

In the afternoon, I read papers about what other people are doing and think about how I could use their ideas. All this work is done on a computer. I also attend Zoom meetings and give presentations on my work.

Sometimes I teach classes to other people on how to do something new. I like doing these because it lets me talk to people instead of being on a computer all day. I finish work sometime between 6-7pm, although some nights I teach students in the US and finish at 11pm.

What my job looks like (when I am presenting)

What my job looks like (when I am coding)

(What my job looks like when I am listening to a conference)