Profile

I live in Edinburgh, which is where I grew up. I live with my boyfriend, who has the same job as me, and my pets:

The cat is called Oscar, and the rabbits are Lola and Jasmine. They are all rescues who I got when their previous owners could not look after them any more, and they are my favourite things in the world even though they are constantly misbehaving!

Caring for them takes up a lot of my free time, when they are sleeping my main hobby is video games. My favourite games are the Pokemon series – bet you can guess why!

My work is called EPCC, which stands for Edinburgh Parallel Computing centre. Computer programs are like step-by-step instructions for a computer to do. Parallel computing is when you write programs where some of these instructions are run at the same time as each other, sometimes across multiple computers. So we are a centre in Edinburgh that specialises in writing parallel codes, and the computers that will run them!

Parallel computing is useful in problems that have large amounts of data to be shared around. Most of the work I do has been to help Scottish companies to use their data more efficiently. For example, I helped to improve a program that could be used to detect eye diseases from images so it ran 7 times faster. Since last year I have been working with a bank to help them make decisions with their data. By doing this I have learned a lot about making mathematical models that can be used to forecast what might happen in future.

I do my work at our office. I thought working in an office would be boring, but ours is really nice, and I like getting to see my colleagues every day. Here is a picture of the building:

I’m allowed to start work anytime between 8am and 10am, but I usually get up early to feed my pets and let them out to play. My work doesn’t have a dress code, so I wear a bright outfit with matching make-up and get the bus to the office.

I usually start my day with a meeting with my Project Manager over a large coffee. I tell them what I’ve been working on, what I am stuck on, and what my plan for the day will be. Once that is out of the way, I work on one of 4 projects:

The Bank

This is my main project. I work in their data science team, we help managers make decisions using data about their customers and products. For example, they might want to know which banks have changes mortgage prices since last week and by how much, and they need staff like me to get that information. I also write programs that make it easier for managers to answer these questions themselves. Data science is a new skill for me, and I’m enjoying learning about it by working with the bank’s experts.

HPC and Wind Energy

This is a research project I’m working on with a team of people from different countries and universities all over Europe. The aim is to improve codes used for simulating wind farms so they can run on the world’s largest computers and using the newest technologies. We hope this will help answer questions such as where are the best places to build new wind farms, and what is the best layout for the turbines so we can make the world a little greener. The other project partners are the experts in the science behind the simulations, I help make them run fast on supercomputers.

Helping Students

We have 50 students this year working for degrees in high performance computing. I am part of the student support team, and help them with any problems they are having, or with their course choices and career decisions. I also supervise one student with her degree project. She is writing a program that can detect clouds in satelitte images, which will help satelittes check if it has a clear view of bases on earth!

Outreach

I do things like I’m a Scientist to tell others what it’s like to work at a supercomputing centre! We get lots of money from the UK and Europe to do interesting things, I think it’s important to tell people we are doing good things with that money. Jobs related to data and data science are also very new, I want to share my experiences in case others would like to do the same job.