Hamish Forrest

Data leader with 8 years of experience in data and life sciences and over 3 years of management experience. I have established and manage multiple high-performing data teams at the Mary Lyon Centre and the National Mouse Genetics Network. I am a Vice-Chair in an international consortium where I foster strategic visions for data and AI. Currently focused on scaling data science capabilities, facilitating machine learning and driving organisational change with data.

Work Experience

Head of Data Management 06/2021 – Present

Mary Lyon Centre Oxfordshire, UK

National Mouse Genetics Network Remote, UK

• Cross-functional data leadership and management of two teams:

• Founded, recruited and led a team of 3-4 data scientists and developers to build data science capabilities to validate commercial phenotyping data of a scientific facility of ∼180 staff.
• Founded, recruited and led a team of 2 data stewards building a big data semantic integration pipeline for a UK-wide collaboration.
• Matrix-managing 12 developers across 3 teams to develop a data export process and client-facing web portal to disseminate 100% of our commercial phenotyping data.

• Collaborative planning and strategy:

• Secured £3,000,000 in funding by co-authoring a data infrastructure and interoperability strategy and engaging with a board of directors for approval.
• Led consensus decisions on community standards and vocabulary for the national data product across

8 research clusters each composed of multiple research groups from 14+ UK universities.

• Technical project delivery:

• Led on statistics and machine learning (inc. 4 publications) to build a data science pipeline across

30+ phenotyping tests adding ”advanced statistical analysis” to the organisation’s service offering.

• Used cloud data warehousing tools to restructure communication across 5 teams and 20+ users to accelerate data QC from months to within 5 days and reduce data quality issues at export to 0.
• Directed ETL data science pipeline development and delivery in Python/R/MySQL which currently holds >4 million validated data points from >4,000 animals.

• Driving and managing organisational change:

• Fostered a culture of data science: wrote and delivered a Modelling and Statistics workshop for ∼20

external customers, supervised 2x 12-week data science interns, ran a data science journal club.

• Developed and drove a data governance strategy in Sharepoint across ∼50 colleagues and ∼250 shares to ensure compliance with retention policies and standards. Recovered >£190,000 volume.

Vice-Chair Data Science ∼5% FTE, 06/2022 – Present

COST Action (TEATIME Consortium) Remote Europe with in-person conferences

• Invited to chair day on data science and data management of an international cross-consortium conference on ”ML/AI approaches to home cage monitoring” in September 2024.
• Directed a 2-day international machine learning meeting of 30 domain experts to facilitate impact of AI in the growing home cage monitoring field in September 2023.

Laboratory Manager 05/2020 – 05/2021

University of Oxford Oxford, UK

– Managed day to day operations of a computational neuroscience research group (∼12 members including

3 PostDocs).

– Improved experimental planning horizon and reduced cost by programming a resource management system to organise breeding strategies and predict availability of genetically modified mice.

Experimental Neuroscience Research Assistant 05/2019 – 05/2020

University of Oxford Oxford, UK

– Developed data science in Python after integrating emerging genetic tools with experimental optogenetics procedures to image cortical inhibition at fast timescales.

Data Analyst (Freelance) 07/2020 – 05/2021

Thrive Consulting Services Remote

– Developed standardised survey data methodology in Python at an early stage of company growth.

Neuroscience Research Assistant 08/2017 – 05/2019

University College London London, UK

– Contributed towards a large-scale neuroscience collaboration seeking to pioneer reproducible decision-making and behavioural tasks in mice (The International Brain Laboratory et al. 2020).

– Designed and prototyped tools necessary to align cortical inhibition with underlying spatial transcriptomic patterns (Bugeon et al. 2022).

Education

University College London London, UK

MSc Neuroscience (Distinction in Project) Graduated 09/2017

– For my independent research I wrote a computational model to predict mouse decision-making.

Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield, UK

BSc Biomedical Sciences (1st Class) Graduated 09/2015

– Co-authored a Nature publication under Prof. Gartland at the University of Sheffield (Cox et al. 2015).