Scientist from Derry. I like building things that automate problems away, and reading when I'm not.
I'm from Derry, in the northwest of Ireland. I did my astrophysics PhD at Queen's University Belfast in 2022, then worked as a Research Fellow building image recognition software for Randox Laboratories.
Now I'm the Global Lead Data Scientist at Nexus Brands Group, building data systems and analytics across 18 businesses in the beauty, tattoo, and pet grooming industries. Different domain from stars, same satisfaction in solving problems.
My PhD was on nanoflares - tiny explosions on the sun, about a billionth the energy of a normal flare. Individually insignificant, but hundreds or thousands might be happening every second across a star's surface. That adds up, and they might explain why the sun's atmosphere is so mysteriously hot.
You can't see them directly, so I built simulations and statistical models to extract their signals from noisy data. Later I adapted those techniques for biomedical imaging - finding faint signals in noise turns out to be useful whether you're looking at stars or cells.
I like writing code that solves problems - the kind of thing where you build something once and it saves you hours forever after. Most of my spare time goes into little automation projects or tinkering with whatever's caught my interest.
I built Pascal, an iOS app that tracks barometric pressure to predict weather changes. It uses on-device machine learning that learns your local weather patterns automatically - no cloud, no internet required.
When I'm not at a keyboard, I'm usually reading. Check out my Goodreads to see what's on the pile.