Profile

My name is Steven and I live in Glasgow with my wife Sonja. She is from Finland. That’s one of the best parts about University (where we met). You get to meet new people, from new places. Anything can happen.

Much of my life revolves around music. If I am not listening to music I am writing music or reading about it. I go to a lot of concerts in Glasgow.

I love board games and have friends round a lot to play all-day sessions of games such as Port Royale (check it out!) and whatever else we find out about from a regular event in a nearby cafe where people come and swap games for the day.

We quite like sharing things overall, and get involved in fun ways of car-sharing, instead of buying one, and grow our own vegetables in a ‘community garden’ which lots of people use. It’s better for the environment to use only what you need, and reduce waste. We like to do our best to connect with nature and get out of the city when we can to enjoy the beautiful countryside.

Oh, and I love pizza!

My job involves working with a large team, with some people based at a University and others based at a Hospital. We meet regularly, sometimes at University, sometimes at the Hospital.

The project we work on aims to help people with Cancer, something that unfortunately affects lots of people nowadays. They get very sick and need lots of help, including taking medicines. Often, the medicines have nasty side effects, like feeling really tired all the time, or being sick.

We want to find out what it is really like to be taking such medicines, so we can develop better treatments for people with Cancer and try and reduce the side-effects. This work also means we can find out more about what it is like just now – so we can inform new patients about the reality of taking a course of treatment to help them make the best decision for them, knowing what to expect. We can make it less scary for them by giving them as complete a picture as possible.

The job means we travel around a lot, meeting people. We want to develop a new system in Scotland which collects information from people with Cancer, giving important updates about how they are feeling, so that doctors and nurses have a more complete picture of their health to be able to give them the best treatment. We need to come up with a way of doing this that works for everyone involved, so it’s a big project – it will involve working with people who know about computers to set up some new ways of making it easy for Cancer patients to be able to communicate with doctors and nurses digitally – using computers and phones.

It’s a big project involving lots and lots of different people all with different skills. It’s really important to rely on the expertise of others and trust them so we can move forward quickly and get things done.

I’m not sure there is such a thing as a typical day. I guess there’s three different types of days.

Office: Most days I am reading about the work that other people have done that is similar to what we want to do – this helps us make better decisions by knowing what works well and what does not well. I write regular summaries on different things which are important at different stages of the project to report back to the wider team. If I am not doing this, I am working towards specific data collection days or analysing data. This involves using specialised techniques to make sense of what is important to people with Cancer, and their doctors.

Meetings: I go to lots of meetings. All of the big decisions are made as a group. Often I present what is known as a ‘paper’, which is normally one of the summaries I have from lots of reading – it could be my suggestion on how to move forward with the project, that we should do something a particular way. This involves making a case for why my suggestion makes sense. With so many people on the team, there are lots of other points of view to take into account before moving forward.

Data collection: This involves talking to people with Cancer, sometimes sitting in on their meetings with doctors, to listen to their conversations. We also develop surveys to use with patients, and this involves lots and lots of work with patients themselves after figuring out what is important to them so we can include it in the surveys.

On top of my main job, I continue to do some research into music and am working on a book just now. I am also trying to work some teaching into my role as I love being a teacher. I learn as much from the students as they do from me.