Career Profiles | Careers | Real World Data Science – Real World Data Science

‘I fell in love with math, really, and fell into data science because of that’

Leadership

Management

Communication

A passion for solving mathematical problems led Niclas Thomas to a PhD in machine learning and then a career in data science in the retail sphere. Now head of data science for clothing retailer Next, Thomas reflects on his career journey so far.

‘Living my identity takes courage. It is the same courage necessary to start a new business’

Consulting

Leadership

Econometrics

Sampling

Machine learning

Albert Lee, the founding partner at Summit Consulting, describes his career journey – from mathematics and economics at university to the birth of data science and building a company from scratch.

‘I was inspired by the power that numerical data have to tell stories and promote policy change’

Education

Research

Policy

Mentoring

Statistical literacy

Claire Morton is an undergraduate student at Stanford University. In this Q&A, Claire explains how a high school job in a cell biology lab led to college studies in mathematical and computational science and environmental justice.

‘Once I started to see what was possible with data science, there was no going back’

Internet

Real estate

Leadership

Statistics

Stakeholder engagement

Chanuki Seresinhe is head of data science at Zoopla and Hometrack. This is her career story so far – from researching beautiful places to helping web users buy, sell and rent property spaces.

‘For me, data science is about bridging the gap between business requirements and the data that businesses have’

Data analysis

SQL

R

Bootcamps

Education

Jasmine Holdsworth ‘fell in love’ with data science while employed as a data analyst at Stack Overflow. Now working as a data scientist at Expedia Group, she explains how inspiring mentors, R-Ladies meetups, and a commitment to learning (and teaching) helped shape her career path.

‘I always thought someone like me couldn’t work in data, let alone data science’

Publishing

Data engineering

Data strategy

Machine learning

Sami Rahman, head of data engineering and data platform at Penguin Random House, parlayed a psychology degree into a data science career – inspired by a talk on machine learning’s application to human behaviour.

‘Data science challenges you to keep learning – there’ll always be new advances in the field’

Automotive

Analytics

Leadership

Machine learning

Tamanna Haque, lead data scientist at Jaguar Land Rover, shares her route into data science: from pursuing a maths degree at Manchester to analysing vehicle data for a major automotive manufacturer.