Profile

I live in Wales with my boyfriend. We don’t have any pets which I’m really sad about, but at my parent’s house I have a cat called Tom 😺 (he is ginger). I spend a lot of my free time volunteering for a charity called Skills and Volunteering Cymru, where we help vulnerable people who live in South Wales 🤝. My favourite thing to do is listen to live music, but because there aren’t many live events at the moment I spend a lot of time with my headphones on 🎧!

At the moment I work as a scientist, but before that I was a social worker who worked with young people who had difficult lives at home. My job as a social worker inspired me to do research in mental health, because I saw how many people needed help.

I love my research because it combines all the things I like: maths, creativity, psychology and programming!

My research is all about how we use apps like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and what they can tell us about how we are feeling. The words that we use on apps, the time of day that we use them, and how often we use them can all reveal something about our mental health.

We can then use a technique called machine learning to get computers to try and guess whether someone is struggling with a mental illness from their social media.

But why would we want to do any of this? There are two main reasons…

1 ) At the moment the only way we can measure if someone has a mental health problem is by asking them to fill in a questionnaire. If we could measure someones mental health constantly we could learn a lot more about how mental health works. We also wouldn’t need to rely on them filling in questionnaires.

2 ) There are too many social media posts for a person to monitor, so if a computer could detect if there is a problem they might be able to help a person to get help quicker.

Even though there are good reasons for guessing someone’s mental health, there might be some bad reasons too. So does that mean we shouldn’t be doing it? These are ethical questions about research, and are a big part of my job too!

My days change a lot depending on what I’m working on, so here are some examples of things I do.

Sometimes I am programming, this would mean sitting at my desk most of the day and writing code! Normally the code I’m writing is to help me collect data automatically from the internet, or to automatically analyse it. I find this really satisfying 😄

Other days I’m working with people to understand what they think about ethical issues. This involves organising meetings, designing the questions I want to ask and then leading the meetings. Afterwards, I have to write up everything that was said, and look at all the information to find themes from the conversations we had.

The other main part of my job is statistics. This is a way of turning lots of data into information we can actually use. For example, I have lots of data about people’s social media use, so I can use statistics to find out if girls use social media more than boys.

Being a researcher also means staying up to date with what other people are researching. To do that we all have to read research papers that are published by other people doing similar work to us. My target at the moment is to read one per day!

This also means I have to write papers about my work sometimes, to share what I find out with other researchers.