Profile

Hi I live in Nottingham with my boyfriend, I have no pets but desperately want one- update I now have a 9 week old kitten -Lilo! When I was younger I wished for a pet Giraffe but have settled with visiting them at Chester zoo instead!

My favourite food is ice cream- I don’t understand how people can ever say they only eat ice cream in the summer, I need it all year long. I love musicals (especially Hamilton & lion king) and Disney (especially Hercules, frozen, tangled,… ) I also love computer games- I have played WoW, I currently love stardew valley and really want to buy a switch so I can play animal crossing!

I love going away, and am very lucky as my job means I get the chance to conferences all over the worlds- my current highlight was travelling to Zanzibar

I am a passionate advocate for mental health awareness and minorities in Stem. I have organised many women in maths events and am an editor of women and pride in maths newsletter. My pronouns are she/her.

My PhD looked at statistics of network data particularly how we can represent text as a network (see picture for an example)

. Network data isn’t as simple to use as your standard list of numbers which meant I had to adapt standard methods to this tricker data set (think about it how do you find the mean of a networks?!)

I now use really large data sets on maternity data for women in Tanzania to predict pregnancies at risk. This data is challenging to work with as it is very messy  and sparse ( what this means is some data is missing and some data is just incorrect- for example when I see a data point that says a 30 year old women has had 100 children, I’m thinking that’s probably wrong). I have to use clever methods to work with these challenges plus many more. Whilst it may sound hard its really rewarding work with such a positive application and impact

My job is very flexible and each day really is different to the previous one.

I normally will spend a large amount of my day on or by my computer. I like to code a lot- the data I use can be so large I have to use code to run statistical methods. For one data set just finding the mean took around an hour on a computer!

I sometimes do some teaching, sometimes this is teaching students how to code other times I will meet one to one with students and go through maths questions as well as checking on how they are feeling.

With my job it is important to be learning new methods and ideas and so I often have to read a lot to teach myself maths I may not be as familiar with. I also spend a lot of time googling things to help learn.