Find a Data Champion

I am a PhD student in developmental biology in Ben Steventon’s lab. Through being part of the Data Champions network I hope to learn more about the management of data and share this understanding, as it develops, with my community. I hope to be a part of making academic research more accountable, accessible, and communal.

I’ve been working in the Department of Psychiatry for almost a decade now. I specialise in improving process and workflow and in research data management. I also work in branding, digital recruitment, website design and administration, social media management, and data architecture. I am particularly good at thinking of new and creative solutions to emerging problems. I am currently working on ways to govern and organise the many research projects within my department and in the School of Clinical Medicine, and on creating ways to share research and imaging data (MRI, PET etc) openly.  

I'm a research fellow working to improve data management practices broadly across the materials and chemical sciences, with the aim to accelerate discovery and enable new data-driven approaches in the physical sciences. I lead the development of the decentralised open source RDM platform, datalab, used by several labs in Cambridge and beyond to track sample provenance, ingest raw characterisation data from instruments and easily disseminate data within and between labs. datalab has been designed primarily with materials chemistry and battery groups in mind, but has been extended to work for polymer research, direct air capture and autonomous labs. I also work extensively on API standardisation for crystal structure databases, via my involvement in OPTIMADE. I am very happy to discuss how people can engage with this work if they are in this domain, or how the approach could be adopted by other domains.

Before starting my current role, I completed my undergraduate studies in Theoretical Physics at the University of Manchester, after which I joined the University of Cambridge for an MPhil in Scientific Computing and subsequent PhD in Physics where I worked on crystal structure prediction for battery materials. I then joined UCLouvain in Belgium for a postdoc and research fellowship, before making my way back to Cambridge in 2025 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow.