In this blog post, Dr Jim Rafferty, Senior Statistician for the MAGENTA project, shares with us his inspirational journey into research.
What did you do before joining Population Data Science at Swansea University?
PhD in theoretical physics from 2007 – 2011. I worked for a medical physics research company for four years before returning to academia.
What sparked your interest in a career in research?
I’ve always been motivated by learning new things. Research in health data science allows me to learn about what’s in the data but also mathematical techniques for data analysis.
If any, what challenges have you faced in your journey into research?
Short-term contracts make it difficult to think about the big problems and projects I would like to work on and to plan my life outside of work.
What type of research have you worked on?
My research is at the mathematical and statistical end of health data science. In my new role under the supervision of Prof Rhiannon Owen and project PI Prof Rich Fry, I will be doing statistical analysis looking at exposure to heat during pregnancy.
I’m currently working on the HDR-UK Medicines driver programme with Rhiannon and learning all about Bayesian modelling. Previously, I worked on clustering multiple long-term conditions, where I used a mathematical structure called a hypergraph, which had not been used for this application before. Before that, I was the SAIL analyst for the Diabetes Research Unit at Cymru.
What areas of research interest you? What does the future hold?
I am interested in developing novel mathematical models that improve our understanding of relationships in data. Linear models are useful and easy to fit, but it’s rare for the relationships to be so simple. The large-scale data that we have in SAIL means we have the opportunity to try to understand very complex relationships in a way that few others can.
What advice would you give to someone looking at a career in research?
The team of people that you work with is more important than the project you work on. Find a group of people that allow and enable you to succeed.
HDR UK Medicines in Acute and Chronic Care Driver Programme is part of HDRUK’s five Research Driver Programmes that will harness the power of large-scale data to deliver ground-breaking scientific impacts and infrastructure innovation. HDR UK Wales is one of the 12 Centres of Excellence based in Population Data Science at Swansea University. Find out more about their work on their website.
