Profile

I grew up in the North-East, just outside Durham. I left to go to university in London and have never quite managed to make it any further north again.  I now live in Cambridge and work at Connecting Science at the Wellcome Genome Campus outside Cambridge, and at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge. My work often means that I’m a social scientist surrounded by scientists, which I always find absolutely fascinating.

My days are pretty varied. Most days I’m based in my office at Hinxton or Cambridge, so they start with a cycle to work. I’ll usually start with catching up on emails, which can take far too long, and working out what’s on my list of things to do. This is usually running at least a few weeks behind!  I’m often out and about in meetings or at conferences, and I work on a couple of European projects, so I spend time on the phone or Skype with colleagues from these.  Otherwise, I’ll try and go through some of the data I’m currently working on and get it together for publication, or work on edits to articles that I’ve received back from scientific journals.  If I’m lucky, I get to work at home a couple of days a week, writing up my research, analysing data, drinking coffee and occasionally visiting the bakery round the corner.