Profile

I live in Cambridge with my husband, and moved here 4 years ago.  Before this I spent most of my life in the South West of England, and still miss living near the beach, and the rolling hills and cliffs! I like to have a go at new things, so have lots of hobbies and skills – although I’m pretty mediocre at all of them – I love being outdoors, walking, outdoor swimming, and recently I’ve started kayaking. I also love baking, enjoy sewing the occasional skirt or dress, and am a very novice (but improving!) knitter.

I use machine learning, which is a method based in statistics, to create new climate models.

Traditionally we make predictions about climate change by using computer models, which encode lots of physics that we understand about how the world works. These models give good understanding about what could happen in a changing climate, but are very slow to run.

My work looks to create new models based on machine learning, in combination with the physics of the world, which can be faster than traditional models. Machine learning is all about looking at data, and finding patterns in how things happen, so we can then make predictions based on these patterns, instead of just based on physics.

I am a PhD student, based both at the British Antarctic Survey, and the University of Cambridge, and spend my time working at both offices, with loads of other brilliant scientists.

A usual day involves a lot of time spent at my computer, writing code to both create models, and to assess these. I also go to meetings to find out what other people are doing, both in the climate sciences, and in machine learning and data science. I have lots of supervisors, so most weeks I meet with them for an hour or so, to explain what I’ve been doing and discuss what would be sensible to try next.
I also spend a lot of time reading papers from scientists all over the world, to see what can be done and how well other things work – this makes sure I don’t just do the same thing that other people have already done, and that I can build on other peoples ideas and techniques.
Every so often I go to a conference, where I get to meet with lots of other scientists, and talk about our work together.