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+---
+layout: post
+title: ### Introducing...
+categories: blog
+excerpt: ### blog introducing three people from Kirstie's lab 
+tags: [] ### INSERT TAGS IF APPLICABLE
+image:
+  feature:
+link: 
+date: 2019-08-13 ### UPDATE date
+modified:
+share: true
+author: GeorgiaHCA ###
+---
+
+:tada: :star2: :rocket: Introducing three of my stellar Turing colleagues... 
+
+## :star: Sarah Gibson :star: 
+
+#### "Tell me about your background"
+
+For her PhD in Astrophysics, Sarah worked on a NASA (:heart_eyes:!!) project called Swift hunting down gamma ray bursts. Gamma ray bursts are very brief flashes of high energy radiation, and it’s difficult to predict when and where they will go off. 
+
+Gamma ray bursts form in two ways: when young massive stars go supernova, or two neutron stars merge together. The first produces gamma ray bursts which are long in time duration because they have a lot of matter. They happen in very early galaxies and are very bright, and studying them tells us a lot about the first galaxies that were formed after the Big Bang. Many galaxies may not be bright enough to see without these gamma rays, so studying them can help us discover new galaxies, as well as telling us the composition of stuff between us and the burst - e.g. what our galaxy is made of, what the galaxy the burst happened in is made of, and what the stuff in between is made of.
+
+Dead stars that merge are much older:  you need to have time for two stars to die and then spiral into one another. Studying the gamma rays which neutron stars emit can tell us how often we can expect stars to die and how often collisions occur when stars are orbiting each other.
+
+NASA uses an autonomous satellite which can react rapidly and make decisions without a controller, and Sarah used Monte Carlo methods to optimise her model to the data. She also spent a month in Namibia where there’s an on-ground telescope, looking at gamma rays emitted from black holes at the centre of our galaxy. We can use this information to learn more about how standard the Milky Way is compared to other galaxies.
+
+#### “Tell me about your research at the Turing”
+
+Sarah’s official job title at the Turing is “Research Data Scientist”. There are two distinct roles, data scientist and software engineer, which are often seen as a binary, but the Turing treats them as a spectrum, and Sarah floats between the two. 
+
+As a data scientist, her job is analytical, and involves things like cleaning data sets, chosing the right methods to answer particular research questions, and creating data visualisations. As a software engineer, her work involves building tools, and following best practices when using code to answer questions. She says that it’s very important to remember that code is not infallible, a human has to create it and we are subject to our own biases and opinions that might be transferred.
+
+If you don’t follow best practice, you run the risk of creating unreproducible code, or code that doesn’t do what you think it’s doing. There is the risk of the code producing an answer or output that that isn’t obviously wrong but is still wrong, and this is a real issue if there’s no transparency and no-one can interrogate it.
+
+Sarah is involved in creating The Turing Way. This was originally a guide for doing reproducible data science; but it is evolving into a more general guide. She has been linking up with the Binder community, as they have a great tool for sharing code and data very easily. Binder is a solution to being able to test whether you can get the same results from the same data: this could be by using mybinder.org which is completely public, or by installing your own binder hub and enabling it to work with a private repository. 
+
+#### “What’s your ideal outcome of your time at the Turing?”
+
+Sarah finds that the Turing gives her the opportunity to work in a lot of different domains and projects. Her ideal outcome would be that through the Turing she can “find my groove” as well as the domain that she is best at and appeals to her most. She’s proud to work with the Binder community and has been asked to be a long-term contributor - anything she could do to contribute to the community and push technology forward would make her very proud. 
+
+Sarah also wants to learn to do all of the cool things - every day is a different challenge, and it’s nice to have space to learn things properly!
+
+#### “How are you finding the Turing?”
+
+“Amazing! It’s a really supportive environment, and the ethos is much more about collaboration than competition. People are not too possessive over their work. It’s nice to be able to share knowledge and get to a good solution together.”
+
+## :star: Ang Li :star: 
+
+#### “Tell me about your background”
+
+Ang is currently a PhD student. His college major was in engineering, specialising in space flight. He studied in the Northeast of China in the Heliongjiang Province at the University of Harbin. Ang was born in a very small city. At first, he didn’t know that much about engineering, but he was told that it was very lucrative! When he started studying, however, he found that he was not so interested in engineering and switched to brain science. He is very interested in the biology of the brain.
+
+#### “Tell me about your research at the Turing”
+
+Ang is interested in mental disorders, especially schizophrenia, and developing clinically useful biomarkers to help psychiatrists by using genomic or neuroimaging data. Ang would also like to use genomic data to understand the pathology of schizophrenia. The pathology itself is complex, but it is a very important area to understand, and many answers emerge from examining the genome. The other part of Ang’s research is about understanding the concept of human consciousness. Ang is also interested in neurodevelopment, using neuroimaging data to help understand the emergence and pathologies of some mental disorders– this could be used to predict why adolescents might have mental health challenges.
+
+#### “What’s your ideal outcome of your time at the Turing?”
+
+Ang would like to learn about reproducible research from Kirstie. His area normally deals with many different types of data, for instance genome data, gene expression and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) data. As the real real-world questions, especially in brain science, are always complex, expertise from a lot of different domains is required to answer them: psychology, psychiatry, genomic science, mathematics and even physics. Ang believes that a diverse community of people from different specialisms is a necessary to answer some important scientific question. And it could be useful to cooperate by linking their ideas closely along with some uniform code.
+
+#### “How are you finding the Turing?”
+
+“I love the working environment of the Turing, it’s different from my Chinese lab and I have more free space – I can work in a different place every day. Also, the Turing has the great advantage that we can meet people with diverse backgrounds and fields.”
+
+## :star: Yini He :star: 
+
+#### “Tell me about your background” 
+
+Yini majored in psychology and is currently doing a PhD in neuroimaging. She changed her subject because during the last year of her undergraduate degree she started to be an intern teacher in a special school, and a lot of students had mental health challenges such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Yini found her time teaching them an amazing experience. She enjoyed their creativity and talking to them, and she wanted to do things to help them and to change their lives for the better. She couldn’t find a perfect way to do that within education and psychology, so she decided to change her field. She started working in a hospital - Xiangya – which is very famous hospital in China – and met people there. She realised she would like to know about adolescents, and to research if it would be possible to screen vulnerability to mental health issues, and maybe use the screening to find ways to make people’s lives better in the future. 
+
+#### “Tell me about your research at the Turing”
+
+Yini’s research interests at the Turing divides into three stems:
+
+1. Finding out how personality types relate to mental health differences: using questionnaires and scales to scope out people’s personalities or individual traits and then building a model to predict mental health issues when that person is under stress, compared to when they’re not.
+2. Finding out how neuroimaging can be used to predict mental health differences: investigating what are the biomarkers or the brain regions which suggest different mental states.
+3. Investigating the relationship between the personality, the brain, and mental health. Yini wants to find relationships between the personality and the brain, and how both of them could influence human behaviour and susceptibility to certain types of mental health issues. 
+
+Personality and the brain may be combined to influence behaviour. In research, Yini collects images of different people’s brains and data about their behaviour, and uses longitudinal data to examine these under different stress conditions to see how the brain and personality will influence mental health. Collecting data over multiple points in time is important, as it helps to discern causes from correlations. 
+
+#### “What’s your ideal outcome of your time at the Turing?”
+
+Yini is very interested in open science, which is new to her but which she thinks is a very good and clean way of doing research. She wants to study Kirstie’s way of doing research and learn from her. She also wants to improve her skills in coding and work with other people who can help her. She can learn from Kirstie, who is a very supportive supervisor, and she’s also happy to find peers and friends to learn new things with. For Yini, teamwork is very important, and at the Turing she can find good team members and support to help answer meaningful questions – which is her ideal outcome.
+
+#### “How are you finding the Turing?”
+
+“I think my major and interests involve very complex questions, based on a lot of different kinds of knowledge such as neuroimaging, computer programming, and biology, so I would like to communicate with people from different fields, and coming to the Turing I’ve met a lot of amazing people, so it’s very interesting.”
+
+### <em> Fun Extra Fact </em> 
+
+<em> I found out that Yini and I share a nickname – her friends call her the same Chinese name I was given when I worked in Beijing – Hwa Hwa – which means flower! So we have a special connection. </em> :cherry_blossom::cherry_blossom:
+
+:octocat: Superstellar thank you to Sarah, Ang, and Yini for giving me their time and patiently answering my questions. I'm so excited to be working with you all! :octocat: