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My name is Jon Leslie. I work with data, lead a team, teach data science and help others bring data science into their organisations.
I spent the first part of my professional life as a biologist, trying to understand how cells communicate with one another during animal development and adult life, with a specialisation in the circulatory system. I have since switched gears and am now a data scientist, leading a team at Pivigo and mentoring data scientists-to-be through the S2DS programme.
My career so far:
1990 - 1994: Undergraduate life. I studied mammalian physiology at Penn State University, where I also taught undergraduate classes and researched plant cell physiology.
1995 - 2000: The Utah years. I worked at the University of Utah studying endocytosis and the genetics associated with human neonatal epilepsies. I also learned to ski and snowboard and spent a lot of time in the mountains.
2000 - 2003: MIT. I worked in the biology department at MIT, where I studied the molecular mechanisms that enable mammalian cells to move throughout the body.
2003 - 2008: The PhD. I moved to London, UK, where I completed my PhD research at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute studying the ways in which cells communicate with one another during embryonic development. My research focused on blood vessel formation and how molecular signals exchanged between adjacent cells can control the density of the vascular bed, both during development and in cancer.
2008 - 2012: Postdoc #1. I worked at King’s College London studying how skeletal muscle forms during animal development. This work included microarry experiments, which gave me my first taste of the R programming language.
2012 - 2015: Postdoc #2. I joined a lab at University College London studying the ways that molecular signals in early embryos lead to the formation of neural crest cells, the cells that go on to form the structures of the face and neck.
2015 - 2016: The big jump. I left academic research and turned my sights on data science. I spent this year learning about programming, statistics and data science, as well as being a full-time dad to my 2-year-old son.
2016 - 2017: Freelancing. I formed a freelance data science consultancy business, which specialised in working with clients to design data science projects. Many clients were new to data science, so this work largely involved having conversations with stakeholders about how data science could empower them to do more with the data they had. I was also heavily involved with the Science-to-Data-Science ( s2ds ) boot camp run by Pivigo, where I worked as a technical mentor to teams of data scientist trainees working on real business problems.
2017 - present: The Pivigo years. I joined Pivigo as the Head of Data Science to build and manage our internal data science team. We drive all internal data science projects and are responsible for working with Pivigo’s clients to design projects that create technology, data resources and data products. In 2020 I was promoted to a slightly new role: Director of Data Science.