Employee spotlight – Mads Kock

To start our new blog series about our amazing employees at ScienceAtHome, we introduce Mads Kock. His experience in our organization goes way back to when he made his bachelor project in 2011. This blog is an interview with Mads on how it is to work as a data scientist at ScienceAtHome.

Mads Kock Pedersen, MSc in Physics at Aarhus University

How did you start to work here and when?
I started working with Jacob Sherson (founder of ScienceAtHome) as part of my bachelor’s project back in November/December 2011. The project was about how to theoretically build a transistor with laser light and a single atom that could control the flow of atoms in an optical lattice. After my bachelor project was done, I continued working with Jacob. He had just started the work on the first online version of Quantum Moves, and he thought it could be interesting to see if the physics model I had used in my bachelor project could also be used in a game. Even though the optical lattice game didn’t really get off the ground, I continued to work with Jacob on the side of my studies, and that work ended up becoming part of my Master’s thesis. After I finished my degree in 2015, Jacob offered me a job working with the educational and gamification activities of ScienceAtHome, which over time evolved into me having the responsibility for our data science activities.

What is your role at ScienceAtHome?
I’m responsible for the data science activities at ScienceAtHome. That encompasses planning our data collection, analyzing the data, and organizing our data scientists.

What are you passionate about in relation to your work?
My work enables me to continuously learn and develop my skill set. When I work on a research question the process of resolving all the little problems that you encounter along the way can be just as rewarding as finding the answer to a research question.

What is your favorite thing about working here?
Beyond the great colleagues then the spirit that is here. ScienceAtHome was started with an idea about how to do physics in a new way, and we kept that mentality of not being afraid to try new things that might be outside of our comfort zone.

Do you have a memory of a great experience related to your work?
There have been many great memories, but one that comes first to mind is when we launched Quantum Moves in the online and app version. It was a culmination of all the work we had done at ScienceAtHome up until that point, and it was overwhelming to see how many players we got.

Today Quantum Moves has evolved into a new version called Quantum Moves 2 based on the same task but with more functionalities and improvements to the user experience. Read more and play it here.

Play now