Profile

I am married (17 years!) and have 3 children Isaac (12), Nia (9) and Gwennan (5) – we live in rural Kent .

The children each have a Giant African Landsnail and we also have 6 hives of bees in the field behind our house .  A really great by-product of which is a large number of jars of honey which they provide in the summer months .

Last summer I took up running with Isaac – we attended our local parkrun and now go most weeks.  Recently, Nia has been coming with us too .  I am pretty old to have entered by first competitive run – but recently completed the Great Bristol 10k in 57.31 minutes and last week ran the Harvel 5 (miles) in 46.09 minutes.  This is an amazing achievement for someone who had not participated in such active endeavours since school!

As you might expect, I love food.  But I am quite fussy.  I hate mayo – can’t understand why people add it to everything.  I try (reasonably hard) to have a balanced and healthy diet – but this is regularly undermined by my love of cakes, biscuits and chocolate!

My job is just the best.  I make sure that the Agency makes the most effective use of the science available to provide you all with food that is safe and is what it says it is.  This includes evidence from a whole range of science disciplines from toxicology to psychology, considering topics from animal welfare to diet studies.

As part of my role I make sure that the Agency makes the most effective use of the data that it holds.  One of my favourite parts of my job is to take Agency data to tech events like hacks and to help really clever people make innovative applications from it.  Probably our best dataset is the Food Hygiene Ratings data.

Probably one of my favourite moments was presenting at the Inaugural Social Data UK meetup at twitter in London (where the photo with the dalek was taken!).  I quite like presenting – which means that most often in photos there is a tiny me in front of a large screen where I have my mouth open!  Here is one from last week – probably not helped by my dislike of photos of myself 🙂

Usually too many e-mails and not enough time.  If I am lucky learning something new – today it was that we need a mixture of washing machines (mix it up and innovate) and ironing (planned, ordered, nearing perfection).  Tomorrow I will spend the morning at a workshop using my influencing and enquiring skills to determine how to make data about meat more accessible – by the autumn I hope you will be able to access this on the internet.

So you get the meetings (aka workshops, discussions, seminars) but I am also reasonably active on social media (twitter @drsiant, also LinkedIn and Yammer our internal social network).  So I find time during the day to check these networks.  Then phonecalls – including people trying to sell me stuff (usually that I neither want nor need) and people trying to find things out – I have a great network of food experts so can usually identify someone to help when I cannot!

And I love to eat with friends, colleagues and family.  If I don’t eat at my e-mail or in a meeting then I try and find someone in the office to share lunch with.  My preference at the end of the day is to share food with my family.  As they are pretty active I also get to do typical Mum stuff (great taxi etc) and spend time with my children before they go to bed.

My day usually concludes with a final check of my social networks and a call to my Mum!  I am lucky enough to work at home usually Thursday and Friday.  I am lucky enough to work for a progressive employer who encourages flexible working – which means I benefit from saving a couple of hours on the commute.