Profile

The skills of statistics and communication that I use in my job I gained during my time at university. I studied at the University of Southampton, where I did an ‘integrated masters’ (a four year degree) in Marine Biology. During my studies I travelled to Malaysia as well as the Galapagos, but what I really found interesting weren’t whales or dolphins but instead worms, snails and mud! This is what I then studied for another four years as a PhD student.

The ‘marine benthos’ is the word for the mud at the bottom of the ocean, and I was a ‘benthic ecologist’, which means I was interested in the food webs and chemical processes that take place in the mud as a habitat. The sea bed is really important. People say that the Earth is 70% water – well, underneath all that water is the mud of the seabed, so really the Earth is 70% mud! I went all around the UK collecting mud as well as the creepy crawlies that live in it. This was always really messy and very funny! We got to wear big green outfits and would come back looking and smelling disgusting! I would sieve that mud in a giant sink to make sure it had nothing nasty in it. I then would split it into lots of different tanks, that I would keep with different animals in, and keep them under different temperatures and concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). My experiments were all about trying to learn how different animals would change their behaviour if their environment changed. This will help us understand how to study environments that are changing because of climate change, and how we should be measuring and looking after them.

I really like doing craft activities like sewing, painting and knitting. I think these can be really interesting ways to get people to think about science topics in ways they haven’t before, so I like to make science a focus of my craft works. Here are some things I’ve made – magnets painted with famous fossils, an iron-on patch I designed for the ‘mission’ by the famous space dog Laika, a scarf I knitted that shows the average temperature of planet Earth year or year, and a coaster beaded with the Northern Hemisphere night sky as it was on the day I finished my PhD.

After my PhD – four years where you study a topic and earn the title of ‘Doctor’ –  I decided I really liked answering questions and solving problems using numbers. I am now a data analysts at NATS. NATS (which used to stand for ‘National Air Traffic Services’, but nowadays only stands for NATS) is the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control. We supply the air traffic controllers in the towers that help planes take off and land at several UK airports, but we also provide the ‘en route’ navigation for any aircraft that flies through UK airspace. Even if your flight is going from France to Canada, you will fly over the UK, and air traffic controllers based out of Swanwick (near Southampton) or Prestwick (near Glasgow) will be talking to the pilot of your plane to help you get through the skies safely and efficiently. You can learn more about NATS here, or watch a video on a short history of NATS’ air traffic control here.

Every action an air traffic controller takes when talking to a plane, as well as everywhere the plane goes, as well as how much noise it makes or its environmental impact, are all recorded. This is a lot of information that my team in the Analytics department use to consider how we can make the ways that we control and manage the airspace even safer. For example, I work a lot with the ‘project benefit forecasting’ team. Sometimes there will be new innovations (new technology for air traffic controllers to use) or changes to the airspace (a recommendation that planes fly a different route). I work with controllers to assess the potential impacts of the change (e.g. “Oh, with this new control panel it will only take me 2 seconds to give someone an instruction rather than 5”) and I then use machine learning methods on all the data we have about the normal ways that planes fly day-to-day to recommend how big a potential benefit the change will have, in terms of improving safety, or how likely planes are to be delayed, or whether they are now able to fly in a more environmentally friendly way.

NATS is all about looking forwards, at new opportunities – from helping people fly again after COVID-19, to environmental improvements, to looking at how we will use new drone technologies – and my role in Analytics helps people across NATS get answers to any questions or curiosities that could help us push forward.

All of the skills I learned in marine biology I use in my job at NATS; how to think about big questions, how to interpret numbers and graphs to figure out what is going on, and how to explain to people what is going on.

Now I have finished my PhD and I work for a company called NATS, where I do the same sort of work that I did as a marine biologist but on different numbers. All my days look at little bit different, because I work with lots of different people on lots of different problems.

I often work on helping people in other parts of my company understand what is going on in something they are seeing. To answer their questions, I will have to find the right information, do some maths or show it on graphs in different ways to see the patterns, and then present it back to them.

For example, an air traffic controller at at imaginary Pink Airport could come to the Analytics team and say, “I can’t prove it, but I think that every plane that arrives to us from Blue Airport is always late, and it really messes up our day”. Our job would then be to think how we could answer this – we could look at radar data and maps to see where planes went (maybe the route from Blue Airport to Pink Airport is inefficient), or maybe we could look at the air traffic controllers who are working at the times that the Blue Airport planes are arriving (maybe those arrivals only happen when things are busy and planes are more likely to be delayed anyway, so it is not a problem with Blue Airport but instead the time of day that the Blue Airport planes are flying). There’s lots of different things that could be the cause of this problem, and it is my job to help track down what is happening and why.

Being a data analyst in any company is all about being curious, asking questions, and treating every day like a puzzle! This is just like any other scientist, and is exactly the sort of skills I learned as a marine biologist.