Profile

I am a computer scientist working in the maths team at Liverpool John Moores University. I teach students of the data science master programme, and at the final year of our maths programmes. One of the best parts for me is working on my research projects, which involves not only my own work but also a lot of collaborative interaction with other scientists and researchers.

I live in a small village near Liverpool, with my husband and our two children, the youngest in year 4, and the eldest in year 6. We all love travelling more than anything, and every time we have an opportunity, we open a map and choose a new destination. We then get to the task of learning all we can about the place – its food, culture, geography, landmarks, etc. – so that when we visit, we make the most of our stay.

I love music, and recently I decided to teach myself how to play piano. I hasn’t been easy, especially because I don’t have a lot of time, but every time I play the piano, very late at night when everyone sleeps (using headphones so no one jumps from their bed), I have the most wonderful and liberating  experience.

I also love walking, especially long walks somewhere with mountains and lakes. I love nature (except for slugs – I hope you can forgive this) and I give great importance to any action that would help protect our planet.

I enjoy working until very late at night, which I know it is not great and that is why I struggle so much to wake up in the morning. It is just that there are always so many exciting things to do!

Some days of the week I teach. That involves quite a bit of preparation, as I like to bring lots of example from the real life, how they can be solved, and what activities they can do to develop the skills needed. In my teaching I use computers, and most of the time every student will be seating in front of one while I deliver my lecture. I like it like that because every time I say something new, they can go and test it themselves, which helps them to better understand difficult concepts.

Some days of the week I meet with my PhD students. These are like my other children in the sense that I oversee all the activities they do as part of their training to become PhDs. These meetings are exciting as they relate with one the parts of the job that I enjoy the most – research. I also meet regularly with many of the Maths students, as I supervise them in their final year projects.

I also have some administrative responsibilities, one of them is the programme leadership of the MSc in Data Science, which involves overseeing the activities in the programme and looking after the students. I am also a mobility coordinator, which involves helping our students to go abroad to study for a year, or to complete a placement / job experience, or even to visit a country during a summer school. Last year one of my students spent a year studying in Japan!

As part of my research, I read a lot, and work very hard to keep up-to-day with the methodological and technological advances. My research interests include the development and application of machine learning approaches to different problems, but especially medical problems such as cardiovascular disease (heart disease), cancer of different types, HIV, etc. For this, we require a lot of programming skills and understanding of maths, having a good network of experts to work with, and patience! In science things almost never work at the first attempt.

So, these are my main activities, to which we can add a bunch of meetings, conferences, workshops, reading and writing emails, reviewing work from colleagues, writing papers and grants, etc. etc. In any typical day, what it is for sure is that I will go to bed very late at night.