Alicia Sykes's Blog

I have finished a 3 month temporary contract working for the University of Oxford on a project called WWARN, which is the World Wide Antimalarial Research Network, they are a Bill and Malinder Gates funded project, which provides high-quality data resources along with customised research tools as well as a global platform for exchanging scientific and public health information on malaria drug resistance.

I was programming in Java, and my job involved a LOT of data! I was mainly focused on writing a module of a program to calculate the mili-gram of effective active ingredient per kilogram or patient body weight - sounds easy? Think again. There were literally millions of records spread across about 10 different databases, all with different available data, in completely different formats, and some of it (most of it) was incredibly messy - I'm talking 16 layers of nesting in an XML database, and dates written sometimes in words!

Anyway, I learnt a lot, defiantly more that I've learnt at university so far, and I hope I contributed something positive to such a good cause.