Mr John Heap

Personal Statement

I am a Research Software Development Engineer working for the Computational Biology Facility (CBF), part of the Liverpool University Shared Research Facilities (LIV-SRF)

I joined the CBF in 2016 after a successful career in video game development and technical team management.

At the CBF I have worked on many projects, for example single cell sequencing visualisations, ecological decision tools, condatis, and applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) on social media posts.

During the pandemic, I created Symptom Watch to predict hospital demand by looking for Covid indicative symptoms within Twitter streams.

As students returned after lockdown, I was asked to create the Campus Shield Data Visualisation Tool. It combined Covid test results, test appointments, and output from Evergreen health apps with university databases including Banner and Timetabling. This allowed us to give detailed daily updates to the Outbreak Response Team and predict possible clusters of infection.

Currently I am working on a variety of projects that integrate bespoke database design and web applications to allow real time analysis and visualisations of complex bioscience datasets.

I am also a part time CBF manager, focusing on finances and logistics.

In my spare time I climb, write fiction, look through telescopes and tinker in robotic cognisance.