Profile

I just started my third year of my PhD program in UCC. I’m based in the school of microbiology but really I’m a data scientist. My days generally involve spending a lot of time at my computer. In the evening though, I love to cook and my weekends are generally spent meeting up with friends or going for walks!

My research looks at improving how we analyze biological data particularly data from the human microbiome. Our microbiomes are made up of all the bacteria that live in our body as well as their genetic information. In my work, I use methods from statistics and computer science to see if we can get a better understanding of biological data generated by scientists in the lab. For example, we can see if there are any differences in the type or number of bacteria present in the bodies of healthy people compared to people with a certain disease through statistics. Or we could potentially use methods like machine learning to identify patterns in the data and then based on what the computer learnt it may be able to make predictions on new data in the future.