Profile

I grew up in Cambridge, where I started climbing at school, and then moved away to university in Oxford for four years. I’m now very happy to be back home and revisiting my old favourite spots in town! I was a bit worried about making friends in adult life after leaving school and uni, so I’ve joined lots of clubs for dancing, kickabouts, singing, and many pub quizzes. I am a Master’s-level Apprentice at the moment, which means I study for a degree alongside my daily job (no education costs, plus a salary!). I do a lot of outreach in schools with the other Apprentices from work, and it’s great to meet students interested in my field.

My team acts at the boundary between data scientists and laboratory scientists. We can explore the statistical significance of data and the best ways to analyse it for many different other teams. We mainly work on high-throughput (large-scale) data, with separate “pipelines” for each data type: DNA, RNA, Proteins, Metabolites etc. Our DNA pipeline routinely takes in batches of 1000 genomes at a time, while our Protein pipeline is a lot more experimental and can have variable numbers of samples. I help write coding scripts that can automate the transfer of all this data, and I troubleshoot if we get an unexpected result. We have lots of data so we need lots of programming to help it all run smoothly.

Aside from my workday, I am also a part-time Masters student! I need to complete 8 modules that all have a week of intense study, and then three weeks of doing an assignment by myself. I find it very fun because the Masters focuses more on crop science and agriculture, while at work I only use human genomes! I have been studying image analysis, machine learning, multi-OMICs, R, Python, and Java so far.

On a normal workday I will start my morning by reading a new scientific paper – I try to find ones that are relevant to my field but sometimes something else catches my eye, like behavioural science! It is important to keep up to date with advances in your field, and sometimes it directly helps your team. In our morning meeting, we assign new tasks if anyone has the time, and give an update on our work, or ask for help. My tasks tend to be data processing (working on the pipeline, a bit routine), software testing, or working on a longer analysis project with a different team. My meetings tend to be about: my team, my department, my Apprenticeship, journal clubs, interesting talks, or help on a project.

On a normal study day doing my assignment for the Masters, I will either work from home or go into the centre of town and work from the library. I will have made lots of notes from the study week, but there are probably some parts of the assignments I will need to research more, or that I am interested in anyway. I make an action plan and log my hours, and at the end of the assignment I produce a ~2000w report on my analysis, and any scripts I made so the teacher can check that they work. I sometimes talk to the other part-time students on the course, even if they work for a different company!