What did you want to do when you were 16?

I’ve wanted to work in renewables or sustainability for most of my life and my plan at 16 was to study alternative cleaner fuels for aircraft. Then I started college and discovered I much preferred mechanics to thermodynamics. That got me interested in wind turbines.

What kind of qualifications do you need for your job?

I did a degree in mechanical engineering in UL with a focus on design, fluid dynamics and materials. At my first job as a wind turbine designer, I did professional training courses in computer simulation of mechanical systems and fluid flows, which are very important in turbine design.

What kind of career opportunities do you have?

With a degree in engineering almost any engineering career would be open to me if I wanted to change jobs.

Data Analysis is essential in a huge number of industries, and within the renewables industry my experience would be applicable to other types of technology like solar or hydroelectricity. It would also suit many other roles – for example in operations and maintenance, working with the grid operators, or working directly for a turbine manufacturer.

Data analysis seems to be a major growth industry, both within wind energy and other renewables and in other sectors.

Best part of your working day?

For me it’s all about solving problems. My favourite part of the day is when I figure out why a turbine isn’t running, or isn’t performing efficiently, and I’m able to go straight to the people who can fix it to get more clean energy onto the grid.

Something that might surprise people about your role?

There’s a huge amount of variety in the work I get to do, and you don’t need to be that good at maths to do it, we have lots of tools and programmes to help with that.

A lot of people assume that data analysis is boring and repetitive, but I get to do different things every day because no two turbines or problems are the same. Figuring out what’s going wrong requires a lot of creative thinking.