When I first met my wife she described me to her friends as 'a snowboarding geneticist'. That job title doesn't actually exist, or believe me I would be one, but it does combine two of the things in life that get me out of bed in the morning, and I'm really not a morning person.

I'm a postdoctoral research fellow in computational systems biology, which basically means I have a PhD and I write code which gives a computer the information it needs to run a simulation of what might be happening in a cancer cell. I try to find patterns in the results that might indicate something about how aggressive the cancer is and the prognosis for the patient. All this is based on knowledge built up from decades of research by scientists all over the world.

You might have an image in your mind of what a scientist looks like, and that image may or may not be an old guy with crazy hair, glasses and a lab coat. I must admit I'm starting to go a little grey, I have recently been forced to start wearing reading glasses, and even though I've ditched the lab coat in favour of a laptop I've definitely worn a few of them in my time. But science is striving to become more diverse, and although there's still a long way to go, hopefully there are scientists out there who you can look to as role models, whoever you are.

Now I want to share some of the knowledge I've built up since I was a humble undergrad student in Manchester. Since then I've worked at the Sanger Institute (a genomics research centre near Cambridge), and the NHS. I got my masters degree from Brunel University London and my PhD from the University of Barcelona. Back in the UK, I'm missing the mountains, and the sun, but still loving the science.