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Doctors are highly skilled at treating their patients, especially somewhere like Great Ormond Street Hospital which is one of the world’s top children’s hospitals. But they are not necessarily trained to look for patterns in what happens over lots of patients… that’s where I come in. By using maths and computer programming, I can spot patterns in what happens and use this to help doctors provide an even better service. For instance, I used several years’ worth of hospital information to help doctors at Great Ormond Street predict how many intensive care beds they would need over the next week. This helps them plan what surgeries they are going to do, what staff they need that week and when they are going to be really busy!

I’ve also recently worked on using information about all children who’ve had heart surgery in England in the last 10 years to help doctors see how they’re doing in treating patients.  We’re planning to build on  this work by looking at all the different complications that can happen after heart surgery in children. We want to understand better when and why complications happen – this would be the first time doctors & scientists have been able to do this and hopefully it will be a really exciting project!

I’ve also spent quite a lot of time working on projects to save the lives of newborn babies and mothers in India, Bangladesh & Nepal. That has mainly been about looking at data on thousands of births, trying to understand what differences there are between births where babies died and those where babies survived (such as really basic things like using soap or clean sheets). This has  really brought home to me how lucky we are in the UK. This is a picture of a workshop I ran last September in Nepal teaching local charities who work with our university on how to do some of this stuff…

I normally work on about 3 to 5 projects at once – this definitely keeps life interesting…and busy!

In a typical day, I would probably meet with people I’m working with on a project – for instance intensive care doctors at Great Ormond Street or other academics. In  that, we’d look at some patterns I’ve found (with graphs similar to what you might be drawing in science lessons) and discuss what they might mean and where to go next with the work.

If I’m at the beginning of a project, I might spend some time trying to write down the important aspects in equation form – writing down what the main relationships are – e.g. how long patients stay in hospital combined with how many come in and what they come in for can tell you a lot about how many beds you’ll need. This is where being able to do algebra and move equations around as second nature is crucial – but it’s like riding a bike, once you’ve learned and can do it (through practice!!), you stop thinking about *how* you do it…

I’d probably also spend some time writing computer programs to help me look data in different ways to try to spot patterns. This might be putting any equations we’ve developed into computer code but also a lot of this is built on some of things you might learn at maths A-level (probability & stats).

Then there’s writing about my work for academic journals – this is like writing really formal essays that get ‘marked’ by other academics. If they agree with what you’ve done, then it gets published and your work is out there for other scientists to use and build on. As well as that, I also give about talks every month or two to various audiences. Both are a really key part of being a research scientist, since this how other people see what you do…

Finally, I also need to write a *lot* of emails keeping track of the different projects and chat a lot to my colleagues about projects and what’s going on – all my work is done as part of a team and I love bouncing ideas off people and getting ideas of what to try to next.