Profile
Jeff Clark
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About Me:
Hello! I live with my partner, cat and pet tortoise in Bristol. By day I am a researcher using machine learning to screen for diseases, outside of work I’m passionate about the environment and currently am having a go at growing some of my own food!
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Read more
There are some diseases which can affect people’s heart and lungs which are thankfully rare but can be very serious if doctors don’t spot them early. If they were detected more quickly then the doctors could treat the disease and make the patients better.
It is not easy to tell if someone has the disease because the signs of the disease are similar to other things: for example running out of breath quickly. Therefore at the moment it can take lots of trips to see different doctors, and several years, until the disease is identified.
Doctors at hospitals will often take CT scans to be able to understand what is going on inside peoples’ bodies. CT scans are the black and white photos which make people look like skeletons because you can see the bones and organs easily. Lots of people have CT scans for lots of different reasons.
I am working with doctors from the hospital to use CT scans and to try and spot these diseases automatically straight after the scan. Being able to tell if someone has one of these diseases straight from a CT scan would be very useful because it means that many more people can get tested for the disease more quickly. If it looks like someone does have the idease then the doctors can get alerted straight away that the patient might need treatment for this disease. This means that the patient can get treated much more quickly and give them the best chance of getting better.
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My Typical Day:
I wake up, have my breakfast and go outside to see my tortoise and water all of my fruit and vegetable plants.
At the moment I do all of my work from home on a computer and usually start at 8:30-9am. First I’ll usually check my emails and see how any experiments that I have left to run overnight are doing. Depending on the results, I will make some tweaks to and run some more experiments on the computer to try and improve the results. A lot of my time is also spent reading other peoples’ research and writing up my own. I usually have lunch with my partner then have an online meeting with people I work with and finish my work at about 5:30-6pm.
Outside of work I’m passionate about making science and universities more accessible to students from all backgrounds. Therefore I often will spend some time in evenings working on a website I run for students interested in science and engineering PhDs (The Savvy Scientist). If I feel like I’ve already stared at computers for too long, to relax I like to go out for a walk, run, or read a fiction book before going to bed.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Organise events and/or online content (as covid restrictions permit!) to tell more students about science and technology and show them how wide ranging, interesting and valuable it is for society.
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Education:
GCSEs & A-Levels – Wallington County Grammar School, London
Undergraduate degree – University of Warwick
PhD – Imperial College London
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Qualifications:
GCSEs – 7A*s, 3As, 1B
A-Levels: Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Geography, General Studies – 2A, 2B, 1C
Masters degree: Mechanical Engineering – 1st class honours
PhD: Medical Engineering – just a pass, there are no grades for PhDs!
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Work History:
I’m currently in my first job since finishing my PhD. Before the PhD I worked for 3.5 years after finishing my undergraduate degree since I didn’t know what I exactly wanted to go into, and it took a while to find a suitable PhD project. In those 3.5 years I worked as:
Research Assistant at the Department of Haematology, Cambridge University. I was working to help develop an HIV testing device for use in remote regions of the world with very few resources
Contract Engineer, Cambridge Design Partnership. Designing a heart rate monitor for horses and a few other weird things I sadly can’t share!
Research Assistant, Cardiff University. I was helping medical doctors for a few projects: firstly to help deliver anaesthetic (which helps send people to sleep during an operation) and secondly to design and test a model to help train doctors to deliver epidurals: an injection in your lower back.
Before that I had some other small jobs such as interviewing people about their health.
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Current Job:
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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My Interview
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What did you want to be after you left school?
I was undecided, maybe an engineer?!
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Not often
What's your favourite food?
Hummus
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