About me

My name is Helen and I am a data scientist. You can find me in all the usual places (links to the left).

The back story

My background is in social science. My undergraduate degree was in economics and politics, and I have a PhD in social policy from the University of Edinburgh. My doctoral research looked at employment attachment among mothers in the British birth cohort studies, and I went on to work with most of the major UK and European social surveys in my post-PhD life as a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, researching labour market and equalities issues.

So why data science? I wanted an escape from academia, and data science was becoming a Big Thing (if only it had been when I was a PhD student, or better yet an undergrad). It seemed to be all the things I had enjoyed about my career to date - finding, manipulating, analysing and presenting data. I had the generic skills but lacked some specific ones.

So I took it upon myself to do an MSc in Big Data at the University of Stirling. I learned a load of stuff about databases and machine learning, and my dissertation used text mining and sentiment analysis to look at how hostility manifests itself online.

And then… I got a job! Someone hired me to be an actual real life data scientist.

Work stuff

I am a Senior Data Scientist at the Food Standards Agency. I lead a team that look for innovative ways to use data to help us understand which food (and food businesses) might pose a risk to the public, so we can be proactive and efficient at keeping food safe and what it says it is. We draw upon our own data, as well as other data ingested from all over the place, and try to turn it into helpful dashboards and predictive models.

We’re a small team so we have to be pretty full-stack, and get stuck in with everything from user research and service design, to exploratory analysis, modelling, and deploying and hosting at the other end.

This is my website. I had visions of being a prolific blogger but it fell by the wayside somewhat. Maybe I’ll get back to it at some point…

What do you do when you’re not analysing data?

Singing, playing the violin, hiking, cooking and homebrewing.