Fan’s curiosity for the world around her shone through at a young age. Her father, who taught physics in her hometown in China, would foster this interest by explaining how things work, such as the radio, electricity and telephones. He encouraged her to learn programming when she was ten, which first sparked her interest in computing.
She went on to study Computer Science at the Dalian University of Technology, a top science and technology university in north-eastern China. After graduating, she worked as a software engineer, designing and developing software for a NOKIA factory which was one of the biggest mobile phone factories in the world. All the assembly workers in the production lines used Fan’s software, so it had to be very reliable and easy to use. She produced many different designs to minimise human errors, which were sometimes inevitable due to the high-pressure environment.
Fan later decided to have a career break to pursue a PhD in interactive system design at the University of Birmingham. After gaining her PhD, in 2017 Fan became a Lead Software Engineer at the University of Oxford and spent the first six months trying to understand a legacy system with thousands of lines of code. It had the highest complexity of any code she had ever seen and nobody knew how to fix errors. Therefore, Fan completely redesigned it and created a prototype to deploy the system in the Cloud. Her system was presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Services Computing in 2018, the flagship conference for services innovation. This success led to the development of a new system – the Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform (SP3).
SP3 is a cloud-agnostic platform to run bioinformatics pipelines, processing bacterial genomic data using elastic cloud computing. It provides an efficient and unified process of collecting, analysing and comparing genomic analysis. Fan led the development of this platform, which was later presented at the IEEE Cloud Conference in 2019 and won the Wellcome Trust Innovator Awards (Digital Technology), a £1m grant to support genomic data analysis for worldwide Tuberculosis research communities. A paper that demonstrates how SP3 works and how it supports a reproducible and scalable pipeline called NanoSPC was published in Nucleic Acids Research journal in 2020.
She joined SCD in July 2021 to lead the Data Analysis as a Service (DAaaS) group. Fan and her team have since expanded the DAaaS platform to support Gemini and Artemis, aiming to provide it as an extensive service for STFC’s Central Laser Facility (CLF). Instrument scientists and researchers at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source already fully rely on DAaaS to analyse the data generated from their experiments.
Fan is currently working on two projects: PACE (Proper Analysis of Coherent Excitations), which supports the analysis of experiments at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source; and FDP (Facility Data Pipeline), a collaborative effort to address the increasing demands from different facilities. In her day-to-day role, Fan meets the team every morning for a catch-up to get updates from everyone and make sure that all components of the DAaaS platform are operational. She believes it is important to encourage members of the team, saying “I am keen to make sure everyone is working towards their full potential, having the right level of challenges and can grow their expertise by learning from each other.”
Fan feels very lucky to lead the DAaaS team, saying that it is a privilege to work with such a dedicated group of software engineers. She is grateful to have the full trust and support from both her Head of Division (Gordon Brown) and the Director of SCD (Tom Griffin). Fan has enjoyed being able to work closely with other group leaders in the department as well as scientists from ISIS, CLF and other facilities. She says, “Developing software is not a difficult job, but to make sure the software is loved by the users is much harder. I have the team and all the support to work towards it, which is fantastic.”
As a mother of 12-year-old twin boys, Fan encourages her sons to be inquisitive about everyday life and to find out more, just as her father encouraged her when she was their age. She recalled when her sons came back from school and told her that they used some ‘epic microscopes’ in their science lesson, and they have loved science ever since! Fan believes that aspiring scientists should be curious, creative and just try things out.
