CASE STUDY: CATHERINE HIGHAM

Catherine Higham is a fantastic example of a Daphne Jackson Trust Fellow who has used her Fellowship to broaden her horizons. She is now retraining in the interdisciplinary area of bioinformatics.

Catherine is using all her existing skills and technical background as a mathematician but she wanted to use those skills in a modern exciting area.

She was attracted to Genetics because of its fundamental importance and the fact that new technological developments were leading to exciting new discoveries.

Catherine found out about the Trust through an article on the London Mathematical Society website. Catherine approached her potential supervisor to discuss a possible project based on her experience and is now researching the reverse engineering of genetic regulatory networks. She is based in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow which houses the Bioinformatics Research Centre and provides an environment for collaborative interdisciplinary research in the bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics has become a very active modern area as a result of technological advances in experimental cell biology which has made available low level data giving information about what goes on inside the cell. The research programme at the University of Glasgow aims to close the loop between theory and practice, actively promoting collaborative projects between life scientists and bioinformaticians.

Catherine says, “at the beginning of the year I attended an undergraduate biology course which has provided me with invaluable basic biology knowledge. I participate regularly in a reading group and recently attended a workshop and conference in my area. It’s been hard work getting back into something at such a specific technical level and I’ve had to be patient at times while pieces fitted together. I’ve also been learning scientific language for mathematical modelling and a scientific word processing language.”

Catherine is already thinking about the future and is very pleased to be affiliated to Professor Mark Girolami’s team which is a growing group of researchers, attracting a lot of funding, within the area of Machine Learning and Statistical Inference. She says, “it’s a big research area with many applications for understanding life at a basic level but also applications for drugs and therapy. I’m writing up my research so far and hope to publish a paper, which will add to my credentials as a researcher. There are many opportunities in academia in the area I am working in, but also many opportunities in industry in the West of Scotland in biotech start up companies.”

Catherine is well on the way back to a successful career and realises that one of the most important things to learn is to be adaptable. She is very happy with her work-life balance at the moment and is looking forward to the future.

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