Profile

I’m a PhD student from Glasgow, though I live in Cambridge. I live with two cats and two chihuahuas, which can make working from home a little noisy sometimes! I play drums in a band called Psychic Lemon, which helps me focus on things other than PhD work. I enjoy playing board games (handy when you’re stuck inside!), cooking all different kinds of vegan food and watching films with a huge bowl of popcorn.

Before any new medicine is given to the public, it has to be tested to make sure it works. New medicine is tested by doing a clinical trial, where the medicine is given to a small number of people and the results are recorded. The aim of my PhD is to invent trials that don’t take as long. Faster trials mean that a new medicine that works can get to the public more quickly. Faster trials also mean that when something doesn’t work, we can quickly move on and try something else instead. Specifically, I use statistics to work out the probability that a new medicine will work or not, before the end of the trial, so that sometimes the trial can be ended early.

My PhD is in biostatistics, which just means using statistics for health, and statistics is really just maths. People sometimes think that the only maths jobs in the world are maths teacher and accountant, but there are lots of interesting maths jobs out there, and this is one of them!

I work in an office with PhD students and other people who work in statistics. The work we do involves using statistics for health, so it’s known as biostatistics.

My normal day mostly involves sitting at a computer. However, at the computer I’ll do very different things in one day:

• Computer programming: I design new types of trials for medicine using computer coding. Coding can look difficult if you haven’t done it before, but you can learn piece by piece, like a new language.
• Create interesting images of my findings: This also involves computer programming, but can be a little bit like being a designer as well. I need to think about how to explain a lot of information or a complicated idea using just a few images.
• Write about my findings: I might write a long essay all about the work I’ve done, then send it to a publishing company. That company might publish it so that other scientists can read about my findings.
• Analyse the results of a new trial. A doctor might have run a trial and is now looking for someone who knows about statistics to to look at the results and tell them if their new medicine is working or not. I analyse the results using a computer program.

Other things that I might do, but not every day:

• I might meet up with doctors I’ve been working on a trial with. We could discuss the best way to design a trial for a new medicine. If the trial has finished, I might be giving a presention to the doctor (or doctors), to explain all the trial results.
• Travel! People who work in statistics often give talks about their research findings. This might be at a large conference with 1,000 people, or it might be a small meeting of ten people at a university. Conferences are a great way to see the world and find out about new research at the same time. Also, you end up meeting lots of the same people and making friends. I’ve presented my research in the USA, Belgium, Austria and all over the UK.