Profile
Nicola Wardrop
Sad that the event is over for me - I had great fun!
My CV
-
Education:
Madras College, St Andrews 1993 – 1999. University of Edinburgh, 1999 – 2003. University of California Santa Barbara, 2001 – 2002. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2003 – 2004. University of Edinburgh (again) 2006 – 2010.
-
Qualifications:
I have a BSc with honours in Medical Microbiology, an MSc in the Control of Infectious Diseases and a PhD
-
Work History:
While at school and uni I worked in some hotels and cafes. After my MSc I worked for the Health Protection Agency in London (they do a lot of disease surveillance – looking to see what is going on in the UK). I have also worked at Edinburgh University (research and some teaching of students) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (marking exams).
-
Current Job:
I am a research fellow – I do research on diseases which can spread from cows to people.
-
Read more
I’m a spatial epidemiologist. Epidemiology looks at diseases in populations – so rather than looking at a single person to see if they have a disease, epidemiology looks at lots of people and tries to work out why some people get the disease and others don’t. This is what I do, but I also use maps and some different types of methods (spatial statistics) to understand why the diseases happen in some places and not others.
At the moment I am working on diseases which spread from animals (such as cows) to people – these are called zoonotic diseases. I want to see if people are at more risk of getting the diseases in different types of environment.
I’m working on quite a few different diseases in Kenya at the moment – some of them you might have heard of before (bovine tuberculosis, worms) and some you might not have heard of (sleeping sickness, rift valley fever). The diseases all have different symptoms in people and cows – some are deadly, but some just make the cows and people feel a bit unwell. Overall though, they mean that people lose money, which can cause a lot of problems in a poor area such as Kenya.
Hopefully the results from my research will help the Kenyan Government prevent people from getting infected with the diseases.
-
My Typical Day:
I’m usually based at the computer, making maps, doing some statistics to analyse my data and writing about what I have done.
-
Read more
Normally I’d get up about 7, have breakfast and drive into work. When I get in, I’ll check through my emails first, and then start getting on with some data analysis – a lot of my work is computer based, so I will be doing things like making maps or using statistics to analyse data.
Sometimes I will need to learn more about the method I want to use, so I’ll do some reading during the day as well. After I have some results, I will spend time during the day writing about the work – what I did, what I found and what it all means.
Sometimes I also have meetings with other people in the department to talk about my work – the methods I am using, what results I have and what the next steps are – this helps me to think more clearly about what I am doing and lets me get help if I am not quite sure what to do next.
Other than that, I have lunch on the dot at 12.30 every day, then I head home at about 5 to relax!
-
What I'd do with the prize money:
I would make a computer game about diseases spreading from animals to humans!
-
My Interview
-
How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Curious, greedy, idealist
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Not really in trouble much, but the teachers thought I wasn’t very clever and wouldn’t do very well in my exams.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Today…Shed Seven (an indie band from the 90’s – the music of my teenage years!). Ask me tomorrow and you might get a different answer
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
I wish that we could get a decent summer in the UK this year. I wish that time travel and/or teleportation could be invented, and I could have a personal portal. I wish that the job I have now would carry on as long as I wanted it to.
Tell us a joke.
There were two fish in a tank. One turned to the other and said “Do you know how to drive this?”
-