“What blew my mind is how incredibly powerful the data is”
My background is a little unusual for the kind of role I’m in, as my first degree was in Physiotherapy and my Master’s in Physiotherapy and Clinical Research. I have worked in multiple hospitals and clinics in both Portugal and the UK.
I was then hired by the University of Oxford as a Clinical Trial Manager for a trial comparing physio versus surgery in Anterior Cruciate Ligament injuries. That’s where I really got into the research world. But my goal was to start conducting my own research and work on more applied studies, so after a couple of years I moved on to working on health technologies at the Department of Neuroscience.
This was just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research supported the hospital harnessing our wearable technologies to remotely monitor COVID-19 patients, so we could simultaneously minimize the exposure of doctors and nurses to the disease whilst continuously monitoring patients. My wife is a nurse and at that time she was working in the Oxford University Hospitals emergency department, so very much at the frontline as well.
Wearable technology can feed huge amounts of data by the second – sometimes by the millisecond – and we had all this data that we wanted to use so we could move on with our research and implementation. But at the time, engineering resources were limited. As a result, I started getting my foot in the door of data analytics – and quickly found out that’s what I wanted to pursue. So I then did a postgraduate degree at University College London in Health Data Analytics, while running studies and doing my own statistical analysis on them, and I’ve recently finished a PhD in Intelligent Healthcare at Coventry University.
Everything I’ve been involved in – clinical work, academic, healthtech – has fed into what I do now, which is data science. Coming from a non-technical background makes me a little more pragmatic, so I can extend theoretical concepts into the practical arena.
Working in hospitals gave me a real-world insight into how people actually consume real-time data and what it needs to do for them. Clinicians were just so busy that sometimes they might only have a few seconds to understand what it means and what actions it might trigger. It was vital that the data was really clear so they could get the insights quickly and respond accordingly to what needed to be done.
After all, we can provide very powerful data and graphs and fancy stuff, but none of that really matters if it doesn’t get the message across clearly and quickly. We do a lot of work with corporate customers, and again they’re all very busy people – so our focus is always to reduce the “time to insight” so users can get the answers they need in an intuitive and timely manner.
I believe that’s where both my clinical and research background really helps me. It means I know how both worlds work, and that helps me understand what our users might want to see, how to build it and how to expose it.
I work on Altmetric, Dimensions and other data, together with AI, to create products and dashboards, opening up the enormous power that comes from the Digital Science data ecosystem and then using it to provide actionable insights to our customers. I quickly understood how powerful that can be.
One of our early projects was to build a Share of Voice dashboard, which is an easy-to-interpret summary of Dimensions and Altmetric data combined within pre-specified therapeutic areas or topics. We use Dimensions publication data to build a foundation, then connect Altmetric and other data such as attention or institutional information etc. This means we can basically break it down in whatever way our clients need it: we can give a very broad overview (eg. of a whole therapeutic area or field) or a very narrow focus (eg. particular product, trial or researcher), all inside the same tool.
The thing that’s powerful about this is that it’s all so flexible; we work with clients very closely and keep iterating until we find out what they need and how we can provide it to them. It’s not just the visuals that are flexible, it’s the data; we can structure it in a way that makes sense for each individual customer and meets their specific needs. It’s a level of adaptability that you don’t often see elsewhere.
Another great project was for one of the top pharma companies, where the Chief Medical Officer wanted to know the top five papers that clinicians and researchers were reading on a particular therapeutic area. So we took Dimensions and Altmetric data, and structured it so that on a daily basis it would pull the top five papers being read by clinicians and researchers, with their Altmetric score: how many people were talking about it and who was talking about it, as well as the sentiment indicating whether reactions were negative or positive.
This very simple tool meant that within 10 seconds, the Chief Medical Officer could see the top five papers of that day, week, month or year, and which ones had gone viral – even if they were published a long time ago. Sometimes you don’t need all the fancy stuff – you just need something that’s quick and clear (even though there is a huge amount of data processing running in the background)!
We do work really closely with our customers, and it can be a very iterative process. Sometimes they know exactly what they want and then it’s just a matter of how we’ll provide it – although sometimes they change their mind because we show them something better and they end up wanting that instead! A lot of people aren’t really aware of how powerful our data is, and when we show them what’s possible they get very excited.
We work with so many different kinds of people from all over the world that we come across lots of new challenges and new ideas. What blew my mind when I came here, especially coming from academia, was how incredibly powerful the data is. A good example is the dashboard that benchmarks all the Open Access and the impact on policy and patents for each one of the Sustainable Development Goals. It can be analyzed at institutional level all the way down to a researcher level. One can easily analyze how one and other’s research is impacting the world in relation to SDGs, like how it’s being used in policy or patent documents and what new products, tools or policies are being created citing your work.
Some universities in Latin America and Asia are using this to assess their institutions’ impact in SDGs, and benchmark themselves against the rest of the world. Before, getting hold of this data would have taken them weeks if not months; it took me a week or two to create, and now they can get access to this information in a couple of seconds. So that shows the power of this data, combined with cloud computing.
Coming from a clinical background, my ultimate definition of impact is whether a treatment or product I’ve contributed to or researched on actually gets used – for example, in a local hospital or a national policy guideline. For me, if your research actually reached the patients and clinicians that it targeted (eg. by improving clinical practices), that’s more impactful than the journal you’re published in. I’m passionate about how research translates into the real world. And although it’s not the easiest thing to measure, we’re gradually getting there, and our data is increasingly valuable in showing these types of metrics.
It has to be one I discovered when living in Oxford, which is the Caramel Slice Donut. It has a salted caramel filling, topped with cookie crumb and caramel fudge cubes, Amazing! But a close second is the Bola de Berlim we have in Portugal: it’s filled with custard and it’s really good.
I’d be able to snap my fingers and have a Caramel Slice Donut arrive instantly. But failing that, my superpower would be time manipulation! I think the power to slow down, speed up and reverse time is so underrated: after all, you could fix most problems, preserve the moments you most enjoy for longer, and repeat them whenever you like.
Most of the big events in my life so far have all happened in the last year (2023)! I moved back from the UK to Portugal, finished my PhD and lived in Indonesia for a couple of months. I’ve also been to four continents, got married, got an apartment and adopted a puppy. Maybe I should calm down a bit next year!
