Work Biography
I am an ARISE fellow at EMBL EBI, working on LLM (and other ML) applications in non-coding RNA at the RNAcentral database. I like playing with and learning more about LLMs and adjacent techniques, and figuring out how to apply them to doing cool science. I’ve had to learn a lot about biology in a fairly short time, which has been great fun!
My background is in physics, where I have PhD. Technically in accelerator/particle physics, but I mainly worked on Monte Carlo simulations for proton raiotherapy treatment plan validation. I was a part of the Geant4 collaboration for a while and rewrote the general particle source code to be more memory efficient so it could reliably simulate proton spot scanning sources.
After my PhD I spent 6 years in a radiotherapy research department working on the application of cutting edge statistical techniques to real world data, and trying to learn about radiotherapy outcomes by using data from every patient treated. This was fantastically sucessful, and I wrote some really cool software while I was there that enabled a lot of impactful research. During this position I also started to get heavily into machine learning, kicking off a sub-group focused on the application of ML in radiotherapy and helping with some clinical translation projects alongside my own research on image-derived biomarkers.
Outside Work
Because I like coding, I have an abundance of raspberry pi computers around the house doing various things from running the solar array to just providing a host for my playing with automation of other things.
My other big hobbies are planing in brass bands, and a very niche martial art: Shinkage-ryu Iaijutsu Yamamoto-ha.