Profile

I moved to London from Australia about one year ago, with my husband. We love exploring and travelling, especially in the United Kingdom. I play the violin and love orchestral and classical music – when I was in Australia I played in a community orchestra, but I haven’t joined one in London yet. My other hobbies are baking, reading and running (I am not fast at all, but try to exercise a few times a week to stay healthy!). I have recently learned to crochet (it’s like knitting) which I do while we watch Netflix in the evenings. I often spend a lot of my day at a computer, so I really like doing something more creative in my spare time.

In my job, I use sets of mathematical equations to show how infectious diseases (like flu or measles) are passed on from one person to another. Using maths, we can include things like immunity. We can then use these equations to see what kind of effect a new vaccine might have on the number of infections. We can also see how much a new vaccine might cost. Because the equations are complicated, we use computers to solve them, instead of a pen and paper.

I apply these sorts of methods to malaria, which is a serious disease transmitted by mosquitoes. There are millions of malaria infections each year, mostly in Africa. I work on mathematical models to help plan for new malaria vaccines.

I usually get to the office at about 9:15am and spend some time checking and responding to emails while I have my morning coffee. Some of my collaborators are overseas, which means that things can turn up overnight.

From 10am or so, I’ll work on something technical, as I focus best in the morning. Often this is writing (and fixing) R code in R Studio. At the moment I am writing code to run our infectious disease malaria model across lots of inputs. I chat to my colleagues during the morning as I will always have programming questions for them! By lunchtime, I will definitely need a break.

At lunch, often there will be a seminar, either from another researcher or a visitor from another university. Once a week we play football in Hyde Park. Our department is very social and it’s always easy to find someone to have lunch with.

In the afternoon I might press on with the work from the morning. Sometimes I will meet with one of my students in the afternoon and talk about how their project is going. I might also have a draft paper to revise, slides to prepare for an upcoming talk, teaching material to write, or some papers to read.

I head home at about 6pm. I live very close to work, so I might go for a run or do some chores before my helping my husband cook dinner!

At high school I did mathematics, and ended up finishing an undergraduate degree at university in maths, as well as a PhD in applied maths. However, during this whole time I was never completely sure about what sort of careers and jobs were available for people who studied maths. Also, I was pretty good at maths but not ‘naturally brilliant’, and I thought this meant I might not be able to follow this career path. As it turns out, there are HEAPS of jobs for people who like maths, and all you need is to enjoy maths, be willing to work hard, and to learn from your mistakes. With the prize money, I’d travel to a few different high schools to give a careers talk to maths students about the many different types of careers they can follow.