Looking back, my interest in materials research goes back to my university days. I studied inorganic materials such as ceramics in the inorganic materials engineering department of the engineering faculty. After that, I spent time at a consulting firm in my previous job, helping companies across a range of industries with everything from user behaviour analysis and purchase history analysis to running shopping point schemes and all sorts of other data analysis.

After about two years there, though, I began thinking harder about who I really wanted to support as a data scientist going forward. What I kept coming back to was wanting to be part of how products that make the world better actually come to life.

From there, I searched for companies working in Materials Informatics and came across MI-6. As it happened, an acquaintance of my wife's worked there, and I was lucky enough to hear about it directly from them. The more I heard about what it was like inside the company — specialists with real expertise, coming together and sparking ideas off one another — the more I thought, 'I want to work in an environment like that.'

Day to day, I work on Hands-on MI®, a bespoke service where we carry out data analysis tailored to each client's challenges, present the hypotheses that come out of it, and support their decision-making. Suggesting what experiment to run next is one of the things we can offer too.

One case that stands out to me involved a client developing production technology for precision equipment. Normally, we receive data the client has collected and analyse it ourselves, but this particular client wanted support until their own team could put MI into practice in-house. My predecessor had already been delivering the Hands-on MI® service to them, and my role was to build on that through on-the-job training, encouraging the person in charge until they could work independently. Over about a year of regular sessions, it was remarkable to watch someone who was already skilled become even more capable. I'd never imagined, when I joined, that I would get this involved in developing a client's own in-house talent — it was a hugely instructive experience for me too.

From my early interest in materials, through the research I did in graduate school on the theory and methods of using small data, to the client work I did in my previous job — in my current role, I really feel like all these different experiences fit together like pieces of a puzzle. You could say this job pulls together my whole life so far.

From around six months after joining, I started working more often alongside the sales team to help win new business. More recently, I've also been working on rebuilding Hands-on MI® itself, refining it with the company's future growth in mind so we have the right processes in place to deliver on it. I find it rewarding to be involved in this kind of management-minded work, even at my current level.

I think MI-6 has a culture where the more initiative you take, the more it's recognised. Even though I've only been here about a year, I've often had to make decisions on my own, which has really sharpened my instinct for prioritisation. At the same time, one of the things I like about MI-6 is that you can easily ask colleagues for advice whenever you get stuck or want a pointer. I think it's because so many people here genuinely want to energise the materials industry, or to make things that help society, that it's so easy to talk to one another.

My goal going forward is to see a client use MI to create an innovative new product, and follow that all the way through to something like a new factory being built. Actually seeing something through to commercialisation is extremely rare in materials research, but I still want to keep dreaming big.