Profile

My photo is from back when I was doing my PhD, now ~6 years ago!

I currently live in Borough, London, but will be relocating to the US in 2018 with my partner who’s from Norway, following my ~10 years living here in the Big Smoke.

I spend my free time enjoying London’s culinary offerings, going to the pub, visiting friends and family, catching up with TV and film, or chatting to friends from the UK/US while we play games on the Xbox One. Whether Destiny, SpeedRunners or a solo RPG like Witcher. Plus Twitter/Facebook of course.

Sometimes you’ll also find me doing a pub quiz with local friends or listening to an interesting talk about something sciencey or amusing. Or both.

I recently switched jobs from a university position where I managed communications for a research institute, to being part of a communications team in a Government-owned company running a large, pioneering healthcare and research project.

My responsibilities include looking after our website and social media accounts – making information accessible to participants in the project (who may have a rare disease, or cancer, in their family) and to healthcare professionals in the NHS, as well as research groups who want to work with all the exciting genomic data that is being gathered.

I also handle some queries from people who have joined the project and would like more updates on progress, or want to know about a particular condition of interest to them and whether it’s included in the project or not.

We work with groups of dedicated people who are in the project to improve available information, and send out updates as often as we can either on the website or via newsletter – as well as regular social media activity. Sometimes we also deal with press coverage.

I arrive in the office, get settled, and go through summaries of news items collected over the past day by our media monitoring service. I’ll read several articles about things directly and tangentially related to our project and turn these into a daily news bulletin.

I check our twitter and facebook accounts, and include some of this activity in the e-mail if it’s of interest to our colleagues, and send the bulletin.

I’ll work on ongoing projects e.g. webpage/newsletter editing. We usually have at least one update meeting to attend, as there are several different groups all working away on their area of the project and as the comms team it’s good for us to hear about almost everything.

Probably some writing! We might have some good news to report, or something technical, maybe a business arrangement that’s come through, or other update. Or we’ll have some new materials getting ready to send out to hospitals, for example, so there’s lots of reading and editing – also of big, official reports. We proof a lot of documents for senior colleagues.