Profile

I live in London with my husband and cat. I love doing outdoorsy stuff like hiking, mountain biking and kayaking and this what I spend my holidays & weekends doing. During the week, I like to go out for meals, go to the theatre and to do escape rooms! Plus take advantage of the all the quirky things London has to offer.

I love watching crime dramas on TV but I am also a Love Island addict every summer!

My pronouns are she/her.

I studied maths at university because I originally wanted to be a physicist and I did end up doing my doctoral degree (PhD) in Space Physics. But after working in that area for a few years, I decided that I wanted to do something that was more directly helping people and I came to University College London (UCL) to apply maths to health care.

The sort of maths I do is called “Operational Research” but all that means is that whatever you do needs to be solving a real problem that someone has – and you use any mathematical method that works to solve it. It’s a really practical bit of maths which is why I love it – I get to see how my work is used in the NHS every day.

Here are some examples of things that I am working on now:

• Working out where in the country specialised children’s ambulance teams should be placed to help them get to sick children as quickly as possible
• Helping the NHS to track what happens to children born with congenital heart disease and how tracking can help the NHS to get better at treating these children.
• Helping the NHS decide how to prevent cyber attacks (e.g. computer viruses) on their computer systems
• Using artificial intelligence methods in intensive care to spot if a sick child is getting worse as quickly as possible so that their treatment can be changed

I get to work about 9:30am and spend about 30 minutes going through emails and dealing with anything urgent. I normally have at least 2 to 3 hours of meetings a day (sometimes more!) where we decide what things to do next. I do end up doing quite a bit of work at home in the evenings and at weekends though… 🙁

I also spend a lot of time writing reports of our work for publication (i.e. academic articles), reading other people’s reports and commenting on them, and writing applications to the government and big charities (like the British Heart Foundations) for money that lets me hire new people for the team to work on new problems in the NHS.

Because I lead the team, I also have a lot boring administrative work to do which takes up a surprising amount of time.

But the best bits of my job are what I do when I’m not doing any of the above – and that’s actually solving problems by using maths and writing computer code to analyse data and then also meeting with doctors and other academics to brainstorm new ideas for research which can be really exciting.