Profile

Sophie: I moved to London in 2020 (during the pandemic!) to start my new job at LSHTM. I’m lucky to live quite near to a great outdoor heated swimming pool, where I often swim in the morning before work. I’m training to swim an open-water race this summer, probably 1-2 miles (1.5-3km). Last summer I spent two weeks walking from Plymouth to Land’s End in Cornwall, about 160 miles! I camped the whole way, and carried my tent and sleeping bag with me.

Mark: Hi, I’m Mark! I live in London and work at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. I do have a life outside of work, and you can DM me for more info … 🙂

Yang: I was born and raised in Beijing, China and moved to a small town in the US (Williamsburg, Virginia) for university when I was 18. I then moved a few more times (to New York City and Minneapolis), got a couple more degrees, tried out several different jobs (retail, policy think tank, public relations, and even radio show host briefly!) and eventually discovered my passion for public health. I moved to London for a postdoctoral fellowship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine upon completing my PhD in 2018 and have been here since – what I love the most about living here is the amazing theatre scene and am so glad I can now make the most of it that the shows are returning.

Julián: I live in London with my lovely partner and my playful cat. I am an immigrant from Colombia but my family still lives there. I have been living abroad for over 12 years! First, I moved to Brazil to complete my university education and then I moved to France to work as a scientist. Thanks to this I speak four languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French and English. I like traveling and I have visited around 40 countries for vacations. I also like plants and I have a bunch of them in every room of my house. In my free time I do gardening, I walk around the city (I love architecture!) and I play board games with my family and friends.

Sophie: In my most recent work I’ve been comparing different ways to predict how many people will be admitted to hospital with COVID-19 in England. This can help hospitals to work out how many beds they will need for incoming patients. My work uses a lot of ideas about probability and statistics that I learnt as an undergraduate, and lots and lots of coding in R. Before I started my current job, I worked for the World Health Organisation as a data scientist in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa.

Mark: I’m a scientist! Like most scientists, I’m part of a big team, and each person in the team has a small but vital role, and together we can accomplish a lot. I’m part of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, and we use mathematics, statistics and economics to work out the best ways to stop infectious diseases from spreading. As you might guess, in the last 2 years much of our work has focused on Covid.

Yang: I consider myself a scientist that sits between science and practice. While theoretical advancement is important and exciting, I personally prefer the role of turning such advancement into useful applications. In a recent instance, public health professionals in low- and middle-income countries were running into challenges caused by limited COVID-19 vaccine supply. I adapted a mathematical model originally developed by another colleague of mine to identify the maximize the benefits of limited vaccine supply given these circumstances.

Julián: All the information to build every piece of our bodies is stored in our cells in a group of molecules that we call the genome. Viruses also have genomes that are smaller compared to ours but theirs change very fast. I look for those changes ​​and do biological detective work using computer programs (bioinformatics) to reveal how the viruses evolve over time or how they spread from one location to another.

Sophie: I often swim before work, so I usually get up around 7am, swim, and then start work at 9am. Almost all of my work is on the computer, so most of my time is split between meetings on Zoom, coding (in R), or writing about my work. I do my work with lots of other people, so I also spend time talking about my ideas and asking questions. I finish work at about 5:30pm, and have dinner at about 7pm.

Mark: I used to travel around the UK and the world a lot to talk to people in different places and understand what was happening around different infections. Nowadays, I do the same but via Zoom! So I’m glued to a computer screen for most of the day, talking to people from universities, hospitals, government agencies and charities to work out the best ways we can help.

Yang: I am an early bird! On most weekdays I get up between 630am and 7am. After enjoying a morning cup of coffee, I start working between 730am and 8am after commuting from my bedroom to living room (where my computer is located). I work with people in East Asian time zones. Because of the time differences, I sometimes have early morning meetings. For me, afternoon is the time I use to focus on doing the actual science. I may have more meetings with people in the North American central-eastern time zones in late afternoon/ early evening, but I try to get to the gym before 7pm. Time after the gym is for dinner and something relaxing, be it reading, piano-playing, jigsaw puzzles, or TV-watching.

Julián: I am not an early bird so I wake up around 9.00. I have breakfast with my cat (he loves yogurt in the morning!) and then I start coding (this means that I use the computer language to tell my computer what to do) around 10.00. After that, I have lunch and a small break to relax. In the afternoon, I check the results of my analysis and I read the results of other scientists. Finally, I have dinner with my partner around 19.00 and we play board games or watch TV before going to bed.