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About / CV

Table of Contents

About
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I am an intelligent and motivated individual with a keen eye for detail; a quick learner with a wide array of computing and statistical tools at my disposal. In recent years I have moved from hands-on cloud (AWS) infrastructure engineering into infrastructure governance and resilience, running organisation-wide disaster-recovery, audit-response and vulnerability-management programmes for highly regulated, certified (SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST i1, FedRAMP) environments that handle sensitive health data.

Both my earlier scientific career and my current work have involved finding creative solutions to data and infrastructure problems, and I have always had to be quick to respond to changing situations and adapt my work and priorities to suit, as well as managing multiple tasks and projects concurrently. I’m personable, and able to translate people’s requirements into practical, secure solutions.

Experience
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Senior Infrastructure Engineer — Datavant
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2022 – present

My role currently focuses on infrastructure governance, resilience and compliance across the platform organisation. I built the organisation-wide Disaster Recovery programme from scratch; authoring plans, tracking DR coverage across teams and running DR drills. I coordinate the platform organisation’s responses to external audits across SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST i1 and FedRAMP, and coordinate vulnerability management and remediation across teams, alongside security controls, policy and access management. Earlier in this role I also maintained the Privacy Hub environment concurrently; managing its infrastructure as code with Terraform and keeping it secure and SOC 2 and HITRUST compliant, before moving fully into the broader infrastructure governance role.

DevOps Engineer — Privacy Hub by Datavant
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2021 – 2022

Responsible for running, improving and maintaining the AWS environment for data scientists. Created an automated self-serve system to allow data scientists access to the resources they need while keeping the infrastructure and clients' data secure, as well as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, audits and security monitoring.

DevOps and Genomics Data Programmer — Health Informatics Centre, University of Dundee
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2019 – 2021 · Dundee

My time at the Health Informatics Centre was split between many areas, supporting the Trusted Research Environment that gives researchers secure access to health data. I set up and maintained DevOps solutions such as Jenkins and GitLab as well as implementing infrastructure-as-code for the Linux computing estate. I set up computing infrastructure, such as multi-GPU compute nodes, for both internal users and external customers. I was involved in progressing the infrastructure path from traditional on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based solution, including cost predictions, architecting cloud solutions to run bioinformatics pipelines, and evaluating potential solution paths. I worked on setting up a pipeline to reproducibly process genomic data, as well as productionising researcher-written code for reproducible research. I often met with principal investigators to translate their requirements into practical outcomes.

Bioinformatician — University of St Andrews
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2016 – 2019 · St Andrews

Primarily involved in analysing data for projects submitted to the St Andrews Bioinformatics Unit, often designing bespoke pipelines for the analysis (Python, R). The work spanned a large range of topics including developing software for, and analysing, bacterial-infection isolates from hospitals to track infection outbreaks, and the analysis of large RNA-seq datasets from non-standard organisms. Part of my time was spent providing bioinformatics support for colleagues as well as teaching bioinformatics- and programming-focussed courses. I was the system administrator for the 192-core multi-user bioinformatics cluster and tasked with undertaking a large software and hardware overhaul.

Postdoctoral Researcher — University of Dundee
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2013 – 2016 · Dundee

Principally responsible for the creation and maintenance of the primary-analysis sequencing pipeline for the Genomic Sequencing Unit. Over three years I set up, from scratch, a pipeline for the first stage of analysis for DNA sequencing data. I also created a platform for the quality control of the sequencing data produced for each sequencing run, simplifying and streamlining access to the data (Python, JavaScript, MySQL). I provided feedback on errors and advice on actionable improvements to the laboratory, as well as making data available to customers.

Education
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Ph.D. in Bioinformatics — University of Leeds
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2008 – 2013

Investigating a mechanistic hypothesis for RNA polymerase II binding using an enrichment value for each gene based on read counts, applied to large amounts of ChIP-Seq data using linear models.

MRes Bioinformatics (Distinction — top of class) — University of Leeds
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2007 – 2008

Dissertation: Consensus scores for optimising hot-spot prediction in protein–protein binding prediction.

BSc Biochemistry — University of Nottingham
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2004 – 2007

Skills
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Languages: Python, R, Bash, JavaScript Platforms: Linux, distributed computing platforms (Univa Grid Engine), Windows Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, infrastructure-as-code Governance: SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST i1 & FedRAMP audit coordination, disaster recovery, vulnerability management, access management Tools: Git, LaTeX, Ansible

Personal skills
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  • Statistics — both my Ph.D. and subsequent work have involved analysis of large volumes of data.
  • Detail — both my work as a scientist and my hobby as a painter have honed my attention to detail.
  • Problem solving — working with highly sensitive sequencing machines taught me how to identify non-obvious issues, including in areas outside my immediate expertise.
  • System design — designing systems to make large data sets accessible to both professionals and lay people.
  • Adaptable — I have stepped into laboratory work at short notice and taken it on with enthusiasm despite no prior training.

Certifications
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  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate

Publications
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  • J. Ward, C. Cole, M. Febrer, & G. Barton. Almost Significant: Simplifying quality control of high-throughput sequencing data. Bioinformatics. 2016 Dec 15;32(24):3850–3851. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btw559.

Interests
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  • Painting — an accomplished miniature painter, winning awards for both gaming and non-gaming models (see the gallery).
  • DIY — enjoy DIY, having recently renovated our house, and building furniture.
  • Gaming — a keen board and tabletop wargamer.
  • Roller hockey — a recreational roller hockey goalie; I teach goaltending and run learn-to-play roller hockey at the Dundee Ducks.

Contact
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