Kieran McDonough is a Software Developer for the Innovation Observatory who is busy writing code for our OpenScan application. He talks about how he got into the field and his love for working in such a diverse organisation.
Describe your role in the team
The main focus of my work is modernising our OpenScan application, to make a huge amount of medical data easy for our researchers to utilise. My typical day would involve writing lots of code, managing infrastructure and resources and keeping on top of the latest tools and trends to make OpenScan bigger and better!
How did you get into this career, what led you here?
I’m a latecomer to software development after a variety of jobs up until my mid-20’s and not really knowing where my passion lay. After an introduction to coding, I immediately loved it and went to university to study Computer Science, where I completed an integrated master’s in computing and graduated in 2023.
Alongside my final years of university, I had my first job as a developer in the financial compliance sector, which gave me a lot of relevant experience and accelerated my learning. As my final year bachelor’s project was centred around AI and medical imaging data, the opportunity to work in the medical field with the Innovation Observatory was one I certainly didn’t want to miss.
What do you enjoy most about your role? What are you most proud of?
I love the variety of tools I get to use working on OpenScan, no two days at work are the same. I also couldn’t ask for a better pair of teams to work with. Everyone on the Data Science and AI team in the IO and the university Research Software Engineering team are very supportive and have really boosted my learning in the role. I’m excited to see our smaller tasks all come together to make a great application out of the huge amount of data we have.
What do you do outside of work?
When I’m not spending most of my free time with my family and young daughter, I like long walks and hikes, reading non-fiction books across a wide range of topics and gaming if there’s time left (which is increasingly rare!)
To get to know more of our team, take a look at our news page for more ‘In the Spotlight’ interviews here
