Even though many of our graduates will have progressed in their careers since completing a case study, they are still of interest to students who wish to gain an understanding of the world of work.

I am a technical lead for a product called IBM Watson for Drug Discovery. I lead a team of software engineers that is teaching Watson the language of drug discovery. My team builds and evaluates the natural language processing technology that Watson uses to read tens of millions of scientific articles and patents.

In a typical day, I communicate frequently with my team and other members of the wider product team, by email, phone, and online chat tools. I plan our team's work as it relates to natural language processing and processing chemical information, and together with other team leaders, coordinate the overall product's software development and delivery plan. I work on developing parts of our software, and help others with their development by reviewing code and providing strategic direction.

My work is at the cutting edge of technology, and so is an exciting mixture of research and development.

I enjoy working in the healthcare area, as I feel that it has a direct impact on people's lives.

My PhD from the University of Sheffield is in Chemoinformatics, and this provides me with a unique understanding within our team. I plan how to represent chemical information in the Watson system, which is critical for Watson's understanding of the chemical properties that cause a drug to behave a certain way in the body. My BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics is also from the University of Sheffield, and provided me with invaluable skills for this kind of work, in terms of critical and logical thinking skill, specific technical skills related to computer programming and so on, and most importantly, an ability to learn new skills quickly.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: research and development in advanced computational methods for accelerating the design and development of porous materials for clean energy technologies; 2010-2014.

Research Scientist, IBM: technical leadership for the IBM Watson for Drug Discovery product, leading software development for natural language processing and chemical information handling; 2014-present.

I am interested in developing my leadership skills, possibly as a manager or a technical project leader. I am interested in gaining greater responsibility for strategy and development.

The most important skill you can learn, is the ability to learn. Thinking critically and developing your curiosity will help you gain new skills quickly, and meet the changing needs of whatever it is that you do. I did not know anything about natural language processing before joining my team, but I knew how to learn, learnt the skill on the job and became team leader!