I have taken a few turns on my road to the Care & Health Data Innovation sub-theme, but most have been closely associated with computing one way or another. I started as a FORTRAN analyst-programmer in finance in London the 1980s, worked as computer systems manager for a pharmaceutical company laboratory in Cambridge in the 1990s then, after a spell contracting as a network specialist, I entered academia in Dundee working for a PhD in mathematical modelling of the evolution of reproduction distortion strategies of insect endosymbionts.
This led to a spell in 2000s working in molecular biology and chemical entomology attempting find parameters for the models develop in my PhD. Then followed a few years working in computer vision and remote sensing of plants for application to crop irrigation systems. During the 2010s I spent a relatively long period working in bioinformatics, initially preclinical in Dundee and eventually clinical bioinformatics with CRUK in Manchester. I switched from cancer and computational genomics to public health in 2019 moving to Liverpool to work on the use of routinely collected healthcare data for observational research, with particular interest in data quality and inequalities, and the question “Does the data reflect what we assume it does?”