Lorna Brightmore, lead data scientist, tails.com

What has been your career path to date?

I left academia after completing my PhD in Random Matrix Theory and spent the next year volunteering at FareShare in Bristol and travelling around South East Asia. Shortly after returning, I joined the Civil Service as an operational researcher. I was at home here - being part of a bigger organisation and working on technical problems to serve a sort of common good felt quite similar to working in academia and the problem space was interesting.

I started getting itchy feet when I learnt more about data science and the different tools and techniques other companies were using to solve similar data problems. At least at that time, I wasn’t able to bring these tools and techniques into my role. So I left the Civil Service to join the Faculty fellowship program in 2016 and get more practical experience working as a data scientist. As part of this fellowship, I did a project with tails.com and I’ve been there ever since.

While the core values and company culture at tails.com has remained unchanged, the company today looks different to the small start-up I originally joined. As the company has grown, the needs for data and data science and the scope of my role have changed with it.