After graduating, I intend to work in the industry for a while, while pursuing a PhD, and then eventually I want to get into academics, becoming a professor like others who have inspired me in the past.

The teaching environment is really friendly, allowing for lots of open discussion rather than a didactic event where you just listen while a professor delivers their lecture. It really fosters the confidence to ask questions, and just seek out extra knowledge.

I plan to pursue a PhD, and as part of that, holding a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics, a field that is so linked to medicine and healthcare, statistics and computing would set me up on the right track to work in the industry while I pursue my higher education.

My favourite thing about the course is how challenging some assignments are. They’re always simple enough to complete, but require some out of the box thinking, and they’re usually open-ended, too.

In the final year of my bachelor’s degree, I worked on a final project that was a mixture of wet lab work and dry lab. To be honest, that was my first exposure to actual bioinformatics, and I found it very interesting to approach biology and medicine from the perspective of a coder, breaking down complex ideas into simpler bits with code.

Dubai is an exciting city, and one that I am familiar with, having lived here for two years. I did my undergraduate degree in Biomedical Science at the University of Birmingham, in the UK so it just felt the right fit.