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About / CV

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About
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I am an infrastructure engineer who has grown from hands-on cloud (AWS) work 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.

Before that I spent a decade in genomics and bioinformatics, so I’m as comfortable with deep technical detail as with the wider picture. I’m personable and a quick learner, able to translate people’s requirements into practical, secure solutions, and I’m at my best juggling multiple projects and adapting quickly when priorities shift.

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.

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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