Profile
Amy Mason
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About Me:
Disabled female statistician with silly hair. I love LARP, art and chocolate.
I live and work in Cambridge. I use DNA information and statistics ideas.
I try to spot who might have heart attacks or strokes. I also try to work out why that might happen.
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I live with my partner in Cambridge and work and teach at the University. I have no pets because my partner is allergic to fluff, but we do have a housemate called Rowena. We live on the fens, which is flat, open countryside.
This is a picture of me and my partner play-fighting on the fens.
My favorite film is “The Favourite” and my favorite book is “Memory” by Lois McMaster Bujold. In my free time, I like to crochet and do larp (live action roleplay games). I love the creativity that pretending to other characters allows me.
This is a picture of me at a LARP in Italy a few years ago – we were playing a game about what would happen if a really infectious disease started in a small isolated village. I was pretending an evil scientist, who was there to cover up that people were getting ill. The character realized that it was more important to find a cure than make money once she got sick too.
This is my current work-in-progress – a crocheted quilt.
I like to give talks about mathematics and statistics at schools. I made a game for schools called Pathogen. The game is about large outbreaks of diseases and how mathematics (and other skills) are needed to save people.
My pronouns are she/her and I have fibromyalgia. I use a wheelchair a couple of days a week.
This shows me out on a walk in Cornwall with my friend and her toddler.
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My pronouns are:
she/her
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My Work:
I’m a statistician and I look for patterns in UKBiobank, a collection of the genes and medical data of 500,000 people in the UK.
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I use statistics and large datasets to make predictions about what causes a disease. For example, we see that a lot more people who smoke get cancer, so we predict that smoking makes you more likely to get cancer. That cause is well known, so I look at other potential causes and diseases.
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My Typical Day:
I get to work between 9-10am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I only work 3 days due to my fibromyalgia and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I recover.
I spend my day looking at datasets on computers and trying to make sense of them. Sometimes I do this with models, sometimes with graphs and sometimes I talk to other people in my research group. -
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I get to work between 9-10am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I only work 3 days due to my fibromyalgia and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I recover.
I read my emails and work out my priorities for the day. Sometimes I find information for other people in my group – this means I need to talk to them to work out what they want and then create a dataset containing it. Sometimes I take data for myself and use it to create a model of what causes a specific disease.In the afternoon, I read papers about what other people are doing and think about how I could use their ideas. All this work is done on a computer. I also attend Zoom meetings and give presentations on my work.
Sometimes I teach classes to other people on how to do something new. I like doing these because it lets me talk to people instead of being on a computer all day. I finish work sometime between 6-7pm, although some nights I teach students in the US and finish at 11pm.
What my job looks like (when I am presenting)
What my job looks like (when I am coding)
(What my job looks like when I am listening to a conference) -
What I'd do with the prize money:
Retire to a tropical island.
What? It’s only how much? Oh well!Okay – I’d update my pandemic education game to include how the world has reacted COVID-19, reprint the materials and tour it around local schools.
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Education:
Stokenchurch Primary School,
Stokenchurch Middle School,
Wycombe High,
University of Oxford,
University of Bristol -
Qualifications:
GCSEs: Double Science, Maths, Spanish, IT, Textiles, History, Art, English Lang/Lit;
A-Levels: Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Further Maths, Classical Civilisations;
Degrees: Masters in Mathematics (Oxford), PhD in Mathematics(Bristol), Graduate Diploma in Statistics (RSS) -
Work History:
Babysitter,
Boots Sales Assistant,
Assistant (TNS);
Research internships at Southampton, Bristol and Oxford;
Statistician in MMM at the University of Oxford;
Schools Liaison for Stats at the University of Oxford; -
Current Job:
Research Associate at the University of Cambridge.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Colourful, Silly, Smart
What did you want to be after you left school?
A Ceramic Potter. Luckily I had a teacher who explained the different between enjoyment and talent. She redirected me to maths where I have been much much more successful. I still make ugly pots, though
Were you ever in trouble at school?
So much - I wasn't challenged enough, so I was really bored in lessons and used to bunk off to hide in the library and read. #socool
Who is your favourite singer or band?
I love Rachel Bloom and all the songs she made for Crazy Ex Girlfriend.
What's your favourite food?
Pizza, covered in cheese, cheese, more cheese and some cheese on top
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Universal Basic Income for everyone, cure for Fibro and a puppy
Tell us a joke.
The only joke I can think of is the one my Dad told me just before my Oxford interview in case I couldn't think of anything else to say. "Did you hear about the constipated mathematician? They worked it out with a pencil". I did not tell my interviewers this joke.
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