I am a research software engineer in the Research Computing team at the University of Leeds. I have a background in molecular biology, completing my PhD in Virology at Leeds in 2018. I worked as a Data Scientist as part of the Leeds Institute of Data Analytics Data Science Enrichment programme before starting as an RSE in 2019.

My career took a big pivot after my PhD, which was primarily wet lab based, after getting the bug for computational data analysis methods using R and Python. I solidified these skills through my role as a Data Scientist, getting some hands on project work and got interested in techniques for reproducible research and software engineering best practice in research.

My current role as an RSE has helped solidify these skills and advocate for them with researchers across Leeds. The Research Computing team at Leeds also supports HPC users at Leeds, delivers computational training courses, provides research software engineering consulting support and helps develop the computational research community on campus.