Maxine Mackintosh
PhD Student - The Alan Turing Institute

- What is your role at work?
On a day-to-day basis, I’m doing a full-time PhD – mining medical records to find early predictors for dementia. The others hours are spent running a community called One HealthTech that looks to get more women and diversity into health technology.
- What keeps you interested?
I’m looking at the early predictors of dementia so every day that I’ve got a potential signal, or a potential result, it’s so exciting because you feel that you’re making those micro steps towards a fundamentally new cure or a new predictor for dementia.
With my other work, I get to spend a lot of my time meeting amazing people, predominantly women, working in health tech and it’s so fun having a job which requires you to connect people and link people up and solve people’s problems by networking. I’ve got two very dichotomous environments to work in and that variety is good fun.
- How do you feel about doing things differently?
I definitely think you have to be a bit brave working in academia because it’s a very hierarchical place to work. There are lots of men and lots of not very extroverted people, so as someone who likes bright clothes and is an extrovert and a female, I’m a bit weird. You have to be secure in your approach and accept that it’s going to be a bit different and for some people, it’ll work and for others, it won’t. You just have to have the self-confidence to do things your way. Sometimes you’ll mispitch it though – I can definitely think of some quite awkward situations when I have totally misread a room. These things happen.
- Who inspires you?
In the world of data, my inspirations are the people who are really kind and who go above and beyond to make other people feel warm and welcome. In a professional environment, people can take themselves quite seriously and things can get a bit earnest, so my role models are always the people who are open and kind.