Month: October 2018

I’m a first year PhD student supervised by Hywel Williams.  My topic is: “Online (mis)information and climate change: Using network analysis and machine learning to understand environmental debate”.  Whilst data science is central to this topic, the research will be interdiscplinary, incorporating relevant research in quantitative social sciences, communications science and environmental politics.

I have an MBA from Exeter and prior to that undertook a BSc Mathematics at Durham and an MSc in Operations Research at Lancaster.  In addition to my academic qualifications I have 15 years of industry experience working primarily in Reporting and Analyis / Operations in a range of organisations including QinetiQ, BAE Systems Detica, Amazon (Audible) and most recently Crowdcube.

My dissertation for my MBA was titled Measuring the Business Benefits of Social Initiatives and was undertaken with Sony Europe and won the Hutton Prize for Excellence at Exeter.

My name is Sarah Menezes and I am a first year PhD student in the Computer Science Department. My research is in the area of Data Science and my topic relates to the climate change debate on social media platforms. My supervisor is Dr. Hywel Williams.

Prior to joining the University of Exeter in 2018, I worked in Software Quality Assurance and Testing for 16 years. After completing my Bachelor’s in Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology in 2002, I worked at Texas Instruments for over 3 years and then at General Electric (GE Transportation in Melbourne, FL) for close to 13 years. As a Software QA Engineer and Software QA Manager, I lead the testing, releases and installations of train management systems for US railroads.

My expertise in the software lifecycle and in agile development took me to a different path for the first half of 2018. During that time I worked as an Agile Scrum Master for Satcom Direct. As part of a scrum team I worked closely with the members of the team (Developers, QA and Product Owner) to support and improve agile processes.