I was born and raised in Surrey, England. In 2003, I moved to Manchester to study BSc Biochemistry and then, after a year of traveling and working night shifts to pay for traveling, to the University of York to take MSc Bioscience Technology.
After completing a PhD in bioinformatics with Dr Peter Ashton, I worked for a few years in his bioinformatics core facility in the Bioscience Technology Facility. This is where I discovered a love of teaching and realised that I much prefer helping other people with their research projects instead of working on my own.
The work that I started doing at EMBL in April 2015 was the logical extension of that: working to build and support a community of bioinformaticians/computational biologists, through training, consulting, resource development, and information dissemination.
My work at EMBL gave me the opportunity to participate in Software Carpentry Instructor Training. After completing my Instructor certification early in 2016, I became increasingly involved in The Carpentries community, hosting discussion sessions, join the Mentoring Groups program, and eventually becoming an Instructor Trainer.
I left EMBL in August 2020 to join The Carpentries Core Team as a Curriculum Community Developer working to establish The Carpentries Incubator and Lab ecosystem of community-driven lesson development. In 2021 I took on the role of Director of Curriculum. In that position I lead the Curriculum Team, which exists to support and facilitate all of the community’s activities around development and maintenance of lessons.
As well as posts about work and community building, you may find that some of my other interests spill onto this page and you start reading about punk rock and/or cycling. If that happens, I’m sorry.