Greater Cambridge Area
Data scientist, bioinformatician, and mathematician with experience in industry, government, and academia. Comfortable communicating across scientific disciplines and with business leaders. Able to extract actionable insights from complex quantitative data. Technical depth and maturity honed in over ten years' work as a pure mathematician. Currently working at the Joint Biosecurity Centre in the Department of Health and Social Care to support the UK Government Covid-19 response.
I supported the UK Government's Covid-19 response, specifically as it related to international travel.
Microbiotica is a biotech startup -- a world leader in gut microbiome science, aiming to bring live bacterial therapeutics to market in inflammatory bowel disease, immuno-oncology, and C. difficile infections. As the first bioinformatician at Microbiotica, I established basic genomic and metagenomic sequencing pipelines. I contribute heavily to both bioinformatic and statistical R&D for the company. I lead the analysis on a collaboration with a large pharmaceutical collaborator to identify biomarkers and therapeutics in inflammatory bowel disease via statistical analysis and machine learning. I am responsible for aligning the business objectives of the collaboration with an actionable scientific research plan, in addition to coordinating the work of the Bioinformatics team to meet key collaboration milestones.
I sat between the Disease Dynamics Unit and the Bacterial Infections Group at the Department of Veterinary Medicine as part of an interdisciplinary team to detect horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance from one kind of bacteria to another. I supported the wetlab scientists as they adapted chromosome conformation capture (HiC) techniques to work on a mix of bacteria and developed an algorithm to utilize this HiC data for metagenomic assembly. This required working with vets, microbiologists, other bioinformaticians, and occasionally farmers. I was responsible for processing and analyzing the sequencing data produced by our group, which required familiarity with a variety of computational tools (Python, shell scripting, myriad bioinformatics tools) and regular use of the university's High Performance Computing Cluster. I also provided basic statistical support to members of the group. ---------------------- Prior to that, I worked in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, where I applied tools from Fourier analysis to study number theory and combinatorics. I also created two new courses for graduate students -- one about two-dimensional harmonic analysis and the geometry underpinning the Fourier transform, and the other about the application of basic tools from algebraic geometry to solve problems in combinatorics.
I went to UCLA on a fellowship from the National Science Foundation (USA) to develop new analytical tools for conducting Fourier analysis in multiple dimensions, working with something like multi-dimensional wavelets. I also published several papers in the relatively recently developed field of additive combinatorics during my time at UCLA. I gained lots of public speaking and teaching experience by lecturing courses to undergraduates in a variety of subjects -- graph theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, and partial differential equations -- including teaching a calculus class with 150+ students.