Tempest van Schaik

Tempest van Schaik has always been interested in science fiction – from cyborgs and robots to Batman’s tool belt. Anything that augmented the human body to do extraordinary things. This is what attracted her to tech. She started in Biomedical Engineering, specifically interested in medical devices and learning about human health at medical school. She was accepted to complete a medical degree but realized she didn’t want to be a traditional doctor. Instead, she wanted to use engineering to improve healthcare, so she took a second degree in Electrical Engineering. After then graduating from Imperial College London with a Bioengineering Ph.D., Tempest worked for various startups and digital health companies. Tempest has multiple inventions under her belt and has given a TEDx talk about her research project Lab in a Pencil Case.

Now she is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer focused on healthcare on the CSE team. She does real-world machine learning in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry helping R&D teams build and deploy large scale AI solutions. Her favorite thing about Microsoft CSE projects is working on multidisciplinary teams with domain experts from different industries, like doctors. Tempest has worked with a variety of customers, including hospitals, insurance companies, and most recently Project Fizzyo, which helps children with Cystic Fibrosis complete their physiotherapy. The Fizzyo device has also granted medical professionals access to data insights they’ve never had before about physiotherapy techniques and effectiveness. She loves making real impact on the world.

One of the things Tempest has learned working on the CSE team is that close collaboration with customers is key to the success of data science projects. She vividly remembers a project where she sat with medical experts for hours to understand the story behind their data, and had regular check-ins with them to make sure that the machine learning solution was valuable to them and their patients. Beyond the actual work with customers, Tempest also appreciates how much opportunity she gets to learn new skills. Machine learning evolves rapidly, and there is always new technology to keep up with. CSE gives her the support and room to challenge herself so she can continue to develop new skills.