Now

This is a now page, where I occasionally update where I am, what I’m doing, and/or what I’m trying to focus on.

Jan 2026

📍 Munich, Germany

👋 Goodbye Australia/2025, Hello Germany/2026!

I’m now three weeks into postdoc life at LMU Munich. Despite some minor road bumps, I’m settling in well:

  • My colleagues have all been super welcoming 🍻,
  • I have somewhere to live (until September at least…) 🏡,
  • I (think) all my paperwork is order ✔️,
  • I’ve found a regular yoga studio 🧘🏻‍♀️,
  • I had my first experience of walking to work in the snow! ❄️,
  • I had some hardware related ‘black swan’ moments – I learnt that the new M5 macbooks do not come with power adapters, and that when you ask for an “English” keyboard you might receive a British QWERTY keyboard with 105 keys, a short left shift key, and tall enter key, instead of the 104-key ANSI US English keyboard you were expecting 💻,
  • I learnt that in German, when ordering a filled sandwich – you should ask for “ham and egg” and not “egg and ham” 🔀.

On the research side, I’ve been thinking a lot about opportunities for collaboration and cross-pollination between Information Visualisation and Statistical Graphics research. Although both fields research the visualisation of data, and even shared some intellectual ancestry, the relationship between the two fields seems to be mostly coloured by confusion, talking past each other, and missed opportunities. During his opening keynote for IEEE VIS26, Hans-Christian Hege mused on the need for more principled visual arguments in InfoVis and SciVis. Statistics, and particularly the practice of constructing statistical arguments and inference, seem (to me) to be a perfect match for answering this call for an “argumentative basis” for visualisation interpretation. I’m not the first person to notice this, so why is this potential is untapped, and what could activate it?

Dec 2025

📍 Melbourne, Australia

It’s official! As of Aug 20, 2025, I hold a doctoral degree in Mathematics and Statistics from Monash University. My thesis Unified Principles And Tools For Complex Datasets And Data-Driven Workflows was passed with minor revisions and is available online via Monash University’s Library.

Since my last update, I:

  • 👩🏻‍🏫 Delivered a guest lecture, “LLMs for Preparing Data in R”, in the Wild Caught Data unit at Monash University
  • 🧰 Attended the LMU-NYU-Workshop “Making Data Work: Tools for Better Statistical Practice” in Munich
  • 👩🏻‍🏫 Delivered my “Quarto for Economists” workshop for the third time!
  • 🐻 Co-chaired WOMBAT2025 (Sep 29-30) – a two day conference bringing together data folks from industry, academia and government for tutorials and talks on this year’s theme of “Designing Data-Driven Discoveries”.
  • 🇦🇹 Attended VIS2025 (Nov 1-7) in Vienna – ‘Out of the Loop: Enhancing Documentation and Transparency in Collaborative Causal Loop Diagrams to Capture Multiple Perspectives’
  • 🐻 Co-organised the 2026 NUMBAT Hackathon,

Research wise, I’ve been thinking a lot about opportunities for dialogue between information visualisation and statistical graphics, while continuing to work on adapting LLMs for data cleaning.

Finally, I’m excited to be joining the Social Data Science and AI Lab at LMU Munich as a post-doctoral researcher from Jan, 2026!

Apr 2025

📍 Melbourne, Australia

I’m finally (almost) PhD-done! I submitted my thesis for examination after a long but rewarding 3 years and 8 months. Although, I wish I had a bit more time to digest it all, I’m grateful to be leaving Melbourne shortly for a very exciting research trip to:

  • 🇹🇼 Present recent work on an integrative framework for investigating and assessing web-scraped datasets for research applications at National Tsinghua University (Apr 14-18).
  • 🇯🇵 Present ‘TableCanoniser: Interactive Grammar-Powered Transformation of Messy, Non-Relational Tables to Canonical Tables’ at CHI25 (Apr 27-May 1).

When I get back I’ll be continuing to work as a Research Fellow under the wonderful supervision of Rob J Hyndman on tools for ex-post harmonisation, and leveraging LLMs for data preparation.

Aug 2024

📍 Vancouver, Canada, (updated Sep 2024)

I’m finished with conference travel for now and settling into Vancouver until late Oct. I added another conference to my trip (SmallDataSF – which was amazing!), and extended my stay in Vancouver through to the end of Nov. Still working on synthesising various definitions of provenance and provenance-related tools across computer science, applied statistics and data science.

I have some gripes with my past-self for over-packing my travel schedule, but really can’t complain about my first-time experiences at JSM, posit::conf(2024) and tidy-dev-day! I connected with so many amazing people in the data science and stats community, successfully delivered two new talks and even got to squeeze in a spot of outdoor climbing while in Seattle thanks to an old friend.

Jun 2024

📍 Munich, Germany

After jumping through what felt like endless hoops of approval processes, funding changes and decision fatigue, I’ve finally started my many months long research trip across Europe & North America. Some upcoming highlights include:

  • 🇩🇪 Visiting SODA group at LMU (Jun 13-26)
  • 🇦🇹 Presenting on ex-post harmonisation and the {xmap} package at UseR!, Salzburg (Jul 8-11)
  • 🇺🇸 Presenting on assessing statisical programming skills at JSM, Portland (Aug 3-9)
  • 🇺🇸 Presenting on Quarto for Knowledge Management in the Level up your Data Science Skills session at posit::conf(2024), Seattle (Aug 12-14)
  • 🇨🇦 Visiting the InfoVis group at UBC, Vancouver, (Jul-Nov)

It’s hard to express how grateful I am for this opportunity and the support I’ve gotten, especially from my supervisors, to not only expand my research network, but also to experience so many new cities and countries 🥰.

On great experiences, I may have found one of my favourite Vietnamese restaurants (ever, and that’s saying a lot coming from Melbourne) after getting caught in the rain in Amsterdam last week and striking up a conversation with the stranger I was sharing my table with at Saint Jean Deli. The sticky rice Xôi bowl at bonjour càphê is just the perfect blend of textural variety and flavour balance was just chef’s kiss. I had the fish & dill bowl, and the sticky rice felt amazingly light with just the right amount of bite, while the pickled mango gave the dish a sweet and acidic brightness that just perfectly tied together the slightly saltiness of the fish the aroma of the herbs and chilli. My only regret is that I only found this place on Monday when I was leaving the next morning, and their tasting menu is not available on Monday nights 🥲. I’m seriously considering when/how I might get myself back to Amsterdam to try it.