Experience

WearOptimo

• Australia
• Medical Equipment Manufacturing
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Computational Biologist

  • Oct 2022 - Present



QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

• Australia
• Research Services
• 400 - 500 Employee

• Research Assistant

  • May 2022 - Present

  In this job with the Clinical Brain Networks group, my primary role is to manage a large portion of data from the UK Biobank; a large database containing health data from half a million UK citizens including various forms of MRI, diet information, genetics, cognition and mental health, as well as historical health data and variables derived from various tissue and blood samples. Specifically, I've developed a semi-automated pipeline for use in the lab which extracts and pre-processes the significant portion of neuro-imaging data available. I've gained great experience in High Performance Computing environments, and more generally in command line scripting, writing several command line tools to ensure a relatively hands off, repeatable pipeline that could be run by other members of the lab regardless of their command line/programming experience. The pipeline combines command line, R and python code. Being a member of this specific lab also allowed me to gain exposure to other areas of neuroscience research, including aiding in EEG participant studies. The immersive environment created by the head scientists in the lab ensures no member of the team is left behind on any one topic. In my time here, I've participated in learning experiences in the areas of brain modelling, brain activations involved in cognition and complex reasoning tasks, sleep in paediatric and adult populations, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for treatment of severe mental illness, and more specific skills such as signal analysis and scientific presentation. Working with the Clinical Brain Networks group has really opened my eyes to the necessity of multi-disciplinary approaches to modern-day science. This is a neuroscience lab with a range of researchers across biomedical science, engineering, psychology, physics, mathematics, and psychiatry all combining knowledge across a series of separate but similar projects. It's been a joy.



QUT Centre for Data Science

• Australia
• Higher Education
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Research Assistant

  • Jun 2021 - Apr 2022

  At the Centre for Data Science I was in involved in the management of a code pipeline in conjunction with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. This was a bayesian statistical modelling pipeline the formed part of the back end of the ReefCloud dashboard. The modelling pipeline aimed to take input of annotated reef image data from a particular region, according to some sampling protocol, and output spatio-temporal estimates of coral (and other reef life) coverage for the whole region, while also accounting for various reef disturbances such as cyclones and fluctuations in sea temperatures.



QUT (Queensland University of Technology)

• Australia
• Higher Education
• 700 & Above Employee

• Research Assistant

  • Nov 2020 - Dec 2021

  Working in the School of Mathematical Sciences at QUT, assisting with the statistical modelling on a broader industry affiliated project in crop modelling based on various weather variables.

• Sessional Academic

  • Aug 2015 - Oct 2020

  I formed part of the teaching team for many different courses offered at QUT, in disciplines ranging from Science, Mathematics, and Statistics for Medical Science to Engineering, Computer Sciences and IT. While mathematics was the broad primary topic I presented on, many of the courses I taught contained students from a variety of different mathematical backgrounds, therefore requiring the use of a number of different teaching techniques to adequately facilitate learning.

• Associate Lecturer

  • Dec 2019 - Jun 2020

  Lecturing on discrete structures as part of the IT and Computer Science degree at QUT. This class covers topics such as mathematical logic, proofs and graph theory. Content delivered here had been produced already and only required minor updates, and the creation of additional content for just one week/topic. During my time in this role, however, the world entered into a Global Pandemic forcing the majority of on campus education inside the home. In this period, for this cohort of 700+ students, I became responsible for a shift to online learning, after a period of 4-5 weeks of delivering on campus lectures. This unfortunate circumstance allowed me to gain experience in a range of areas that otherwise could have easily been overlooked. These included a steep increase in communications between both students and the teaching team (in the absence of face-to-face meetings/classes/chance encounters etc) to ensure everyone felt comfortable and supported, as well as delivering both tutorials and lectures in a purely online environment.

• STEM Student Ambassador

  • Feb 2015 - Dec 2017

  Science communication with high school students ranging from grades 7-12, bringing their interests toward STEM fields, while simultaneously marketing QUT's campus and facilities. I worked as a Project Ambassador for QUTs VC Stem Camp in 2015, where grade 11 students from across Queensland came together to participate in a week long project (ten groups in total) specific to their field of interest. I helped coordinate and run a workshop on Solar Technology, working one on one with students to help them build their own Dye-Sensitised Solar Cells and facilitate the testing process. I also formed part of the Workshop development team and worked on redeveloping an astrophysics workshop targeted at year 11 & 12 students that ran with great success in February, 2016.

• Public Programs Assistant

  • Jan 2016 - Dec 2016

  The DinoZoo, at the time, was a new scientifically accurate virtual world that ran on the QUT Cube, a two story, interactive learning display screen. The DinoZoo existed to break the stereotypes of dinosaurs set up by films such as Jurassic Park. My roles consisted of running interactive drop in workshops, throughout the year, for the general public that complimented the program and assisted in developing public interest in QUT, and its science programs.



ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS)

• Australia
• Higher Education

• Research Assistant

  • Oct 2020 - Jun 2021

  Worked on various projects involving the creation of Shiny Web Apps in RStudio. Worked on various projects involving the creation of Shiny Web Apps in RStudio.



Research Partnerships

• Australia
• Research Services

• Research Assistant

  • Nov 2017 - Jun 2018

  At the Global Change Institute I was contracted to produce an automated reporting system using Rmarkdown that produced summary statistics and visualisations on big data from global-scale coral reef surveys. The results of this were presented at the 2018 UseR! conference in July 2018. Along with this, I was asked to assist with the data analysis portion of a machine learning experiment. Both of these projects have enhanced my R, and especially Rmarkdown, abilities greatly while also giving me insight into the research process.