On exchange with eSSENCE: Jodie Cochrane and Sara Hamis
Jodie Cochrane.
In autumn 2025, PhD student Jodie Cochrane and Dr Sara Hamis, both at the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University, participated in an exchange visit within the eSSENCE exchange program. Now that the visit has concluded, we took the opportunity to ask Jodie a few questions about her experiences and impressions from the exchange.
How has the eSSENCE Exchange collaboration contributed to your network?
One of my current goals as an early career researcher is to build up my professional network. The eSSENCE Exchange supported an extended trip for myself and Dr Sara Hamis to visit researchers in the Division of Clinical Genetics at Lund University. This helped to solidify a symbiotic collaboration that was previously in the initial stages, and which is an important partnership that will be beneficial for my academic future.
How has the collaboration contributed to your research?
My research revolves around the application of probabilistic machine learning to clinical/biological problems. This collaboration with Lund University represents a new chapter in my research career, in the area of pediatric oncology, which is both challenging and important. This trip allowed for an iterative approach to investigating the data from a machine learning perspective, and which ultimately led to quicker progression of the project. A beneficial outcome is that there is now collaborative work towards a paper which will include the analysis conducted as a result of this trip.
What do you hope the collaboration will lead to in the long term?
The current project involved gaining an understanding of the research problem in addition to preliminary analysis of the data. I believe that there is much more that can be done by using methods from probabilistic machine learning. I hope that this collaboration will continue to grow and motivate future projects where this interdisciplinary approach can be useful for the complex problems that arise in the area of pediatric oncology.