Profile

I live in Yorkshire with my husband and two sons. I like sports such as running, yoga and swimming. I also do lots of crafty things like knitting, painting (sometimes face painting!), sewing and cake decorating. I enjoy scifi and playing my violin in a (non-professional) quartet and orchestra whenever I have a spare moment.

If I could only give one tip to students as they move through school and into university and/or jobs, it would be to Be OK With Change. I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor, but realised while volunteering at a hospital as a teenager that I didn’t like it, which worried me. Then I thought I would be a veterinarian, and then a biologist. Though I loved biology, during my time at uni I found I just didn’t like wet lab work. That knocked my confidence; after all, how could I do biology without working in the lab? But the choices you make when you’re 16 and 17 aren’t set in stone. It wasn’t until I learned you could make a career at the intersection of biology and computer science that I finally found where I wanted to be. Be OK With Change, and if you’re not happy in the subject you started in, keep trying new things until you are.

I work for the University of Oxford in the Engineering Science department. I manage, structure and promote the sharing of scientific data and information. I help develop standard ways of describing scientific data so that it can be easily shared. I work in FAIRsharing, a project that helps researchers, journals and scientific communities share data effectively and openly.

Day to day, my role involves describing scientific data standards, databases and data policies. I also sometimes write programs, manuscripts and documentation as well as meet up with colleagues and any scientists that need help organizing their research data. Communication is a really important part of science; part of that communication is actually talking to people (in person, in conference calls or even in conferences that take me all over the world), but it’s also about communicating the data itself effectively. That’s where my job comes in.

If a scientist wants to do an experiment, they need to know 1) what the experimental data should look like, and 2) how to share that data with their research community around the world. FAIRsharing is all about helping scientific data be more “FAIR”: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

I work from home, and have done since before lockdown. This allows me to balance my work and home life more effectively, as I only work during school hours. Also, I need to work from home as I work remotely, living in Yorkshire and working for University of Oxford. I have a small home office that can get a little cluttered, but then a little bit of clutter can really make it feel like your own space. And if you look very closely, you might be able to spot the wizard’s wand I made with my kids, which I use whenever I need to tackle a particularly difficult work challenge!

My work space – a little cluttered!

Part of my work involves developing ontologies, which are a little bit like family trees for a particular scientific area. I like ontologies for many reasons, not the least their potential for reconciling the many different ways of defining and naming things in our lives. We need a common ground from which to do science, and I think a well-written ontology (or set of them) is a beautiful thing. They are a major tool in my research bag of tricks. Not only that, but I have also helped develop a community-driven ontology for describing life-science experiments (OBI). I have consulted on or helped develop a number of other ontologies in the bioinformatics community such as the Software Ontology.

This is part of SRAO, FAIRsharing’s subject application ontology (https://github.com/FAIRsharing/subject-ontology). We use this to make sure we describe all of the resources on our website with the correct research subject area.

Another big part of my work is curating the information FAIRsharing stores. FAIRsharing helps scientists find out what data standard they should use to describe their data, and also helps them find out where they can store their data so that the entire scientific community can make use of it. Here’s a picture of the website I work on. It shows how connected science is; how each research area is linked to others via the data they make and the way that data looks.

FAIRsharing links scientific databases and data standards to represent how they are related. You can see this one, representing the resources recommended by the Scientific Data journal at https://fairsharing.org/graph/#/collection/bsg-c000001.