After a few years of packing boxes, sweeping floors and sticking pieces of plastic together in a warehouse I trained to become a nurse. After qualifying I worked one year in acute admissions and high dependency, five years in Accident and Emergency and three years in a clinical research facility. During the latter years in A&E I was lucky enough to get funding from Imperial Health Charity to do a Masters in Clinical Research at ICL. During the statistics module I discovered that I had a latent interest in mathematics. Between shifts I learnt remedial maths with the Open University and Birkbeck College until the latter let me do a Masters in Statistics. I then left nursing to take a plunge into a PhD. in Computational Biology at UCL, where I looked at applying several machine learning techniques, and scrutinising their associated methodologies, to vibrational spectroscopy data from various oncology datasets.
I’ve since taken a post-doc research position, splitting my time between King’s College London and University College London, where I work on techniques to explain the outputs of otherwise inscrutable machine learning models as applied to medical data.
I also teach taiji quan and write speculative fiction.
Nathan Blake 