Profile

I’m 23 and a second year PhD student from London(ish).

I live in Edinburgh with my friend, who is also a PhD student. I also live opposite three other PhD students so it’s basically like an episode of Friends at all times (but with more coffee).

In the office we have about 150 stick insects which keep trying to escape.

I love going to pub quizzes, cooking and eating with friends (I’m a recent vegetarian and a terrible cook so I’m always trying to improve), and I play the violin in two orchestras (one small and relaxed one, and one big and difficult one). I also write a blog called Viral Verity for people interested in epidemics and virus evolution!

My preferred pronouns are she/her.

Viruses have genetic information stored in the form of RNA (like DNA but less stable) which changes over time. We can use these changes to ask questions about how it spreads through time and space in outbreaks, and work out what would stop it from spreading in the future.

I work on the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, and at the moment I’m writing a model to simulate individual people moving around and infecting each other, and the genomes will give me the data on how often they do that. I am also working on a new simulated outbreak to prepare for a workshop with public health professionals which we are running in Ghana in December. I’m making the epidemiological side of it, so where people live and how they interact with each other, and how often they died.

I get in around 9.30am and check on my model runs. Some of my models take around a month to run, so I need to check that they are running as they should be so that I don’t get to the end of the month with no data!

The lab group goes for coffee at 10.30, which is a good opportunity to chat to other PhD students, professors etc. It’s often useful to chat to other people doing computer projects because they will usually have heard of an exact answer to the problem in the code you’re having!

Back to the computer, I usually work on some chunk of code that isn’t working. We sometimes have journal clubs as well, where you discuss a new paper, or I also teach undergraduates.

In the afternoon we have a lab meeting about once a week/every two weeks to chat about what we’ve been doing. Sometimes we play the board game pandemic (we all work on virus outbreaks of one form or another!) – we die quite often.

Recently I’ve also been to several conferences to present my work and see other people’s. Conferences are one of the best parts of being a scientist, it’s basically summer camp but for nerds