Profile

I live in Blackheath in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, South East London – in a medium-sized flat which I rent. It’s a nice flat, just about big enough to have friends for dinner, but not quite big enough for anyone else to live in. One of my favourite things is open air cinema and for the last few years my friends and I have screened a film in the gardens of a lovely historic building that’s near me and am keeping my fingers crossed that I might get to do so again this year. My favourite films are Elf and Paddington 2 and I always try and watch The Simpsons at 6pm (and from midday on Sundays). I love film music too and have been to a few film screenings at the Royal Albert Hall where a whole orchestra plays the film’s music along with the film – it’s amazing to watch and to listen to.

Me introducing a screening of The Dish at Charlton House in 2018

Living in Greenwich means I’m very close to the river and during Covid I’ve really missed taking the ferry into central London. It does take longer than all the other ways of getting into London but on a sunny day it’s the best.

One of the ferries I sometimes take from Greenwich into central London.

I love aircraft too and get to see a LOT of them (although not so much at the moment) because I’m on the flight path to Heathrow and sometimes see ones coming in to or leaving City Airport.

I’m a member of the organising team for Dorkbot London, a show and tell event for “people doing strange things with electricity”, which is lots of fun, I love hearing about the creativity that goes into people’s projects. I also look after an email chat list for science communicators around the world called psci-com (p for public, sci for science, com for communication). Some science communicators work as scientists in a lab and also communicate their science, others – like me – work in an office (at home, for the time being) and communicate other people’s science. Psci-com helps people network and hear about jobs and interesting events.

I love going to hear people talking about their work so I go to lots of science talks, and also talks from composers talking about films and TV programmes they’ve written the music for. The next thing I want to learn is shorthand so that I can write down some of the things they say (I know most of the talks are recorded but where’s the fun in that!). I want to learn from my mum’s old Pitman shorthand book from the 1930s!

Also – I’ve just had my first Covid vaccine (Astra Zeneca) so I’m starting to feel a tiny bit more relieved.

The cover of issue 17 of CS4FN magazine on ‘Machines making medicine safer’ which my colleagues and I wrote and edited, you can read a copy here.

I’m the Public Engagement Co-ordinator for the CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun) project and I help get our magazine into schools. This involves a bit of science communication – seeking out stories about computing research to tell to our readers, and writing them and helping edit other people’s stories, and admin (short for administration but hardly anyone ever calls it that). Magazine admin involves finding relevant images to go with our stories, making sure we have enough words in the magazine, getting it designed so it looks good, then printed so that people can actually read it, and posted out to all of our subscribing schools around the UK. My boss at Queen Mary University of London is Prof Paul Curzon and he is a professor of computer science and also a magician. He even uses magic tricks in teaching computing to university students.

I started working for him ELEVEN YEARS AGO!!! … in 2010, when I was working on a project studying ways of making medical devices even safer and easier for doctors and nurses (and patients) to use. Medical devices are(things like blood glucose meters for people with diabetes and hospital machines that pump (gently!) medicine into people who are very ill. The CS4FN magazine is one we wrote about our work on the CHI+MED project (see my Work History in the panel on the right side of this page).

I’m quite lucky in that I generally don’t have too many meetings as most of my work can be done by email. At the moment my colleague Jane and I are writing a paper* which we hope will be published in a journal for Computer Science researchers. At the moment I’m writing and proof-reading to spot any spelling mistakes and to make sure it makes sense, and that nothing’s missing. Jane and I are sending each other several emails every day saying “I’ve done that bit, please can you check it?” though sometimes we do meet up on Zoom when it’s quicker to say something than type it.

Every Wednesday evening I also help out at a course we’re running for IT Professionals who work in industry and who teach their own colleagues how to program. We’re teaching them some of the best ways of doing that. We do that via Zoom so I make sure that everyone on our course has all the information they need to attend the course and get the best out of it – I also sort out the tickets so that we can try and fill all our places. It’s a free course so they tend to be quite popular, but I also help advertise it to make sure people who might like to do the course can get to hear about it.

In a few weeks my boss Paul and I will also get things going on the next issue of our CS4FN magazine, quite a lot of it is already written so there will be editing and some rewriting and maybe a few new articles to be added. We’ll email a copy of our text file to our Creative Services team at Queen Mary University of London and they’ll turn our words into something that looks like a magazine. Then we’ll send that to the printers and they send us a test copy so that we can check that everything’s where it should be. Once we’re all happy we’ll ask them to print 25,000 copies and send a little over 20,000 copies to a big warehouse (who will post them out to our subscribers for us) and the rest will come back to our office. Those ones are ready to go whenever we or a colleague is attending an event and wants to give away some free magazines.

An event with some of our CS4FN magazines and booklets (and classroom activities) on the table. Also some CS4FN-themed bunting in the background.

Another event – this one is QMUL’s Festival of Communities – where we have lots of CS4FN magazines on our table and PLENTY of bunting. You can also see my boss Paul sitting inside the tent.

Here’s a small child who has coloured in and stuck together a cyborg hat that we made for the Festival of Communities. It links things that human brains can do with some things that robots and computers can do. You can download and print one yourself here https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/brain-hatagon/