About me

My current position

Since mid-2020, I have been the Digital Transformation Manager at The Royal College of Psychiatrists in London. I help develop and manage our digital communication channels to effectively communicate to our various stakeholders. Primarily. this includes includes psychiatrists (and potential psychiatrists) as well as anyone interested in mental health policy. But the large amount of mental health resources we have - many translated into several languages - means that we truly have a global audience for people seeking help and guidance on all manner of mental health issues.

I spend a lot of my time looking at analytics data from our website and from our bulk email platform. I love trying to find stories that the data are telling us about how people are engaging with our content (or not, as the case may be).

My past life as a scientist

For nearly two decades I was closely involved with the field of genomics research, ever since I first started my career in bioinformatics back in 1993. As a research scientist I published a number of papers and helped lead some interesting research projects. I also did lots of teaching to students at all levels and co-authored a book on how to teach programming skills to biologists.

Increasingly, my work shifted to communicating about research, and I ultimately realised that maybe I was a better science communicator than scientist. This realisation saw me leave science research in 2016 and move full-time into science communication. Continuing on this path I’ve now ditched the science part but I like to think that I still bring a lot of scientific approaches to how I gather and analyse data.

I am passionate about Open Science, the Oxford comma, and adding milk first when making tea.

Careif

I’m also an associate at a small mental health charity called Careif where I volunteeer my time. A few years ago I offered to rebuild their aging website for them and have since sort of become the person who does all of the website updates and manages their social media.

Other blogs and social media

I have created many blogs over the years, most of which are now dormant. I used to regularly write - several times a week! - about genomics and bioinformatics on my ACGT blog which is now relatively dormant but I occasionally come up with some new thoughts there.

Something I continue to post to every week is the Molluskan Zodiac! The world’s only set of weekly horoscopes that are a) based on mollusks and b) randomly created by a Perl script.