About me

I live in South Africa and since September 2016 I’m the Research Data Scientist at the SKA SA - an international project to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope.

Before SKA SA, I spent 3.5 years working on my PhD in Radio Astronomy at Manchester University, UK. You can find my thesis here and a shorter version of the most important bit on arXiv. And before that I was involved in three projects at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, where I learned LabView, tested components for ALMA telescope and designed a low noise amplifier.

When I write code I usually do it in Python, and occasionally in Matlab. Most of what I’ve been doing at SKA is dockerisation and pipeline development. I’ve started this blog to document my explorations of open data and my journey into the rabbit hole after the Big Other.

Outside of technology, I live in Cape Town with my husband and a cat. I spend too much money on my Mercedes Benz W124 from 1988 and I collect and restore mid-century modern furnitures. I’m a Pole and this should tell you everything about my cheerful and sunny disposition.

As a teenager I spent my nights hunting for aliens, but ended up counting meteores most of the time. In the future I want to be a futurologist.