The QUT Centre for Data Science is celebrating its graduates. Meet Owen Forbes who just celebrated his graduation with a PhD!
What was your PhD in?
My PhD research was in applied statistics and neuroscience – looking at how we can identify unique profiles of brain activity in young people, and link these profiles to risk for mental health and cognitive issues.
How did you come to do a PhD on this? Did things change along the way?
My undergraduate studies were in psychology, and I worked for a few years as a research assistant at ANU in mental health and epidemiology. I was interested in mental health from my personal experiences of managing mental health challenges and supporting my peers, and I have always found neuroscience and psychology to be fascinating. I had the extremely good fortune to meet my supervisor, Distinguished Professor Kerrie Mengersen, by chance at a conference in Canberra. I loved hearing Kerrie talk about Bayesian stats, and when we got chatting she offered me the opportunity to come to QUT and work on a project in statistics & neuroscience. A few years ago I wouldn’t have expected to find myself working in statistical research and data science, but I am so glad to have happened to wander down this path, and get to learn so much from Kerrie and all the amazing and kind experts in BRAG (Bayesian Research & Applications Group), CDS (QUT Centre for Data Science) and the wider QUT community.
How was your PhD journey? Any surprises?
There were some bumps, twists and turns along the way during my PhD, including a total redesign of my project and identifying new data sources about 2 years in. I received amazing support and encouragement from my supervisors and the wellbeing teams at QUT. Parts of the PhD journey were very stressful and exhausting, including managing isolation as a remote student (especially during the acute phases of the pandemic), and dealing with unexpected changes and hurdles along the way. Overall I felt hugely supported especially by the open, warm and positive communication and mentorship of my supervisors Kerrie, Edgar Santos-Fernandez and Paul Wu. I think all PhD students I have met have had challenging experiences of one kind or another, and have built skills to manage their mental health and wellbeing as early career researchers. One of my favourite + proudest elements of my PhD journey was contributing to building a community around mental health, wellbeing and self care for HDRs through the Peers & Pizza initiative. I felt very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such intelligent, kind and expert researchers including my supervisors, peers and colleagues around ACEMS (ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers) and QUT CDS. I got to work on interesting problems with real world use cases, build new skills, and learn a whole lot of cool stuff.
Did you anything else at QUT besides your PhD?
I loved connecting with the HDR student community at QUT. Together with other HDR students in the Science & Engineering HDR Students Society, I founded the “Peers and Pizza” program to provide a welcoming, casual space for HDR students to connect with each other, discuss mental health challenges and share tips and coping strategies with each other. This event series reached a lot of students and helped contribute to a sense of community and solidarity around wellbeing. As part of the Students Society we also organised a bunch of other support resources and fun events for the HDR community.
With support from the CDS, I had the chance to participate in several hackathon events during my PhD including: the QLD AI Hub Medical Datathon in 2020; the 2021 QUT Data Science for Social Good program, working on data visualisation in the Australian Cancer Atlas with the Cancer Council Queensland; the “Digital Mud Army” Rapid Response Hackathon following the floods in 2022; and joining the Good Data Institute (GDI) as a pro bono data scientist through a hackathon project with Skin Check Champions in 2022. I have continued volunteering with GDI on pro bono data science projects with charities and NGOs since joining in 2022. GDI is an awesome organisation and I’d encourage any data science HDRs to consider joining – it’s a great way to connect with other early career data scientists who are keen on data for social good, and work on fun and interesting data projects with really immediate and tangible social impacts.
How was your experience with the Data Science Centre?
The CDS was an excellent source of support and a community home ground for me during my PhD. With CDS funding and resources I was able to participate in events like the ones listed above, travel to attend conferences, and meet and connect with researchers across a bunch of other institutions at CDS and ADSN events. I feel very lucky to have been completing my PhD during the early days of the CDS – it has been an awesome network and community of people, and a generous source of support for participating in valuable activities.
What’s next – or what are you doing now?
After finishing my PhD thesis, I did a 3 month internship at the end of 2023 with a group in Health & Biosecurity at CSIRO, working on building Bayesian trajectory models for Alzheimer’s Disease pathology. During this internship I was networking & applying for postdocs and managed to secure a postdoc position at CSIRO as a data scientist in the National Research Collections Australia. I started this role in January 2024 and I’m loving it so far. I am working on a variety of projects related to statistical modelling in ecology using physical specimen-based data, including spatiotemporal models of how plant ecosystems are being impacted by climate change. It has been fun and engaging to learn the ropes in a new (to me) field of ecology & biology, having come from a background in health research. In some upcoming projects I’ll also get to learn new data skills around topics like machine learning and computer vision for automated annotation and feature extraction from photos of herbarium specimens, and optimal design methods for ‘collecting smarter’ when designing future sampling strategies for biological specimens. I am also fortunate to have the flexibility and support to continue working on some side projects, including writing up remaining papers from my PhD for publication, and continuing this Alzheimer’s Disease trajectory modelling work. CSIRO is a cool organisation and I am working in a great team. To borrow a phrase from my friend (and QUT CDS graduate) Josh Bon, statistics is cool because you get to play in everyone’s backyard. Looking forward to having more fun and learning more good stuff as an applied data scientist in research – I’m excited to see which other backyards I get to play in going forward!