My relatively short but varied career so far (read: weird but wonderful), has been driven by a desire to play some kind of role in improving cancer care, even though the exact role that I envisioned has had some iterations along the way.

Driven by an interest in innovation and intellectual property, in 2015 I started a dual degree in Biomedical Science and Law, in Australia. Realising Law wasn´t for me, I became interested in the commercial side of life sciences. But some time later, after some stints in a business development role and two biopharmaceutical manufacturing companies, I became much more interested in being a part of the research itself. Not one to love lab work however, I stumbled into the AI/ML field and began to gain skills and programming experience along the way through electives and summer internships.

After graduating in 2020, I was fortunate to join the Children’s Cancer Institute as a Bioinformatics RA, within the Computational Biology team and Dr Mark Pinese’s Genomic Childhood Cancer risk team. Over the course of 2.5 years, I worked as part of a multi-disciplinerary clinical team to develop and maintain the pipeline for a clinical study on childhood cancer predisposition using whole-genome sequencing trio data.

Then in 2023, I moved to Europe and started an online Masters in Biomedical Data Science offered by a consortium of Spanish universities and led by Universitat Rovira i Virgil. Most recently in June 2024, I joined DKFZ and the Saez-Rodriguez lab on a part-time basis as a Data Scientist, where I am excited to be primarily working in the SMART-CARE consortium to analyse metabolomics and proteomics data in the context of cancer relapse.