If you had asked me in 2002, when I was a physics undergraduate at the University of Surrey, where I saw myself in 10 years, I almost certainly wouldn’t have said the London School of Economics! But that’s exactly where you can find me today.

I am currently a Research Assistant at the London School of Economics (LSE) working in the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (or CATS), which is a relatively small research group affiliated to the Department of Statistics. My research is mainly focused on developing mathematical and statistical approaches to analyse nonlinear dynamical systems, like the weather or climate system. I am particularly interested in thinking about ways to extract useful information about the future climate by combining knowledge from climate model forecasts, the statistics of past observations (such as temperature and rainfall records) and our understanding of the underlying science – all of which contain some uncertainty. Much of the work I do forms part of a project called EQUIP, which brings together scientists across several UK-based institutions with the aim of providing robust and useful information that could help decision-makers in planning how to adapt to future climate variability and change, which is an interesting but challenging task! You can find out more about what I do here.

I suppose the LSE – a school renowned for its social sciences – may not seem like the most natural choice of career move for someone with a background in the physical sciences. But climate science, and more specifically tackling the grand challenges involved in understanding the science behind, mitigating against and adapting to climate change is a task that benefits from a multi-disciplinary approach, including research across areas from physics, maths and statistics, to economics, philosophy and politics. I am very fortunate to work with people across all these subjects and more!

Of course, I would not have been able to do the research I do now without the skills and background that I gained from both my undergraduate degree and my postgraduate research (I did a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics under the guidance of Paul Stevenson, who is a regular contributor to this blog). I was also lucky enough to have gained invaluable experience – that relates directly to some of the work I do now – as an undergraduate student on the professional training year. Students studying for the BSc are usually offered the option of spending the third year of their degree working in industry at any number of different companies and institutions around the country. I spent my year in the Climate Change Team at the Met Office. Not only was it a fantastic opportunity to put some of the things I’d learnt in lectures to good use (and earn a decent salary at the same time), it inspired me to pursue a career in research and motivated me to work a little harder in my final year! It was also the place I met my husband :o)