Skip to main content
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

Naomi Arnold, PhD Student

Tell us about your work My work looks at how we can represent large systems such as social networks, the Internet or citation networks as graphs, and study how they evolve over time using statistical models. 

Tell us how you got into computer science? My background is in mathematics rather than Computer Science, but I leaned more toward Computer Science after doing some mathematical modelling projects where it became necessary to learn to code, to run simulations and make measurements on large data sets. Now working mainly with large graph data sets I have come to really appreciate how important it can be to be careful how you write/implement algorithms and in that way I feel I appreciate computer science much more than before.

What brought you to Queen Mary? I came to Queen Mary mainly because the PhD project I was interested in was based here, and that Queen Mary has a great couple of research groups for networks and complex systems.

What’s the best thing about your work? One of my favourite parts of my work is how interdisciplinary it is within the research area; there are computer scientists but also social scientists, physicists, mathematicians, economists, engineers who work on networks which brings a really diverse set of perspectives and techniques to the work. 

When not at EECS, what are your interests? Outside of EECS I really enjoy bouldering at Mile End wall; it’s really fun and social and a great way of switching off from PhD stuff.