Aaron did a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in Queen’s University in Belfast and also a Mathematics degree with the Open University. He has five years experience of a software developer in industry and did a Masters in High Performance Computing in Trinity College Dublin in 2007. He completed a PhD in University College Dublin in 2013, studying social networks. In the PhD, he used statistical approaches, such as MCMC, to perform clustering in network data. He worked for one year as a postdoc with the same group in Dublin, as part of the Insight Centre, before moving to the Statistical Genetics Group at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine.