Profile

I live in a town in the hills to the south of Edinburgh with my husband. I enjoy hillwalking and generally spending time outside in the sunshine. We spend a lot of our holidays on the west coast of Ireland visiting family, walking on the beach and swimming in the sea.

I always liked maths at school and was interested in medicine but didn’t want to be a doctor. I had no idea at the time that it was possible to use maths and in particular statistics (which I hated at school) to do medical research. Now I get to do just that! Also, I find statistics a lot more interesting now that I can use it to answer real biomedical questions.

I am UKRI Innovation fellow working in the MRC Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh. This means I have funding of my own to tackle a particular research question but that I don’t yet lead my own research group. My research finds new ways of using maths and statistics to pick out useful and interesting information from the DNA in samples taken from cancer patients. This means that I work with lots of different types of scientists. These can be other statisticians like me, but also molecular biologists, chemists, physicists and computer scientists. I also as you might guess work with doctors in the hospital who are looking after cancer patients.

I’m particularly interested in trying to find changes in the DNA of samples from cancer patients that haven’t been studied that much because they’re hard to find. Then, we can try to understand how these changes might help the tumour to grow. The idea is that patients with these changes may be able to take a drug which slows down the growth of the tumour.

I also work with a couple of students who are interested in similar questions to me to help them try and answer those questions and to help them learn to be better scientists themselves.

My typical day starts with an early bus ride (with flask of tea!) from where I live near the hills outside the city to my office. When I arrive I say hello to the other scientists in my team and hear what they’ve been up to. Most of my day is spent at my computer where I write instructions to tell the computer where in a large amount of data to look for interesting new discoveries. But I don’t spend all day at the computer! I spend lots of time meeting other researchers and talking about what they’re doing and what we’re going to do next as a team. I also spend time chatting to students working with me to find out how they’re getting on and to encourage them in working out what questions to investigate next.