Amy Heineike got interested in data because she wanted to ask questions about big, complex systems, and found that she needed data to model those systems and answer her questions.

After studying mathematics at Cambridge, Amy worked in a small economic consultancy in London studying things like how cities grow, and the effect of the structure of social networks on public policy. Her favorite project examined what would happen to London if the city built a new tube line, and how to value it. One of her findings on that project was that the value wasn’t derived just from the time people would save getting to and from work—which isn’t a large amount—but rather from the increase in the productivity of the city that would result from more people being able to work in the city center.

“It was like a boot camp for learning how to do modeling and statistical analysis for data sets,” she says. “I got to be a huge geek about data, which is why I got overexcited that Bob was starting something that was going to be very data-driven.”

She met Quid co-founder Bob Goodson from their days at university; he was at Oxford with Amy’s husband, while Amy was at Cambridge. “Bob was always coming up with some crazy project and then actually executing on it really well,” she says. “When I heard he was starting Quid, I wanted in.” She became employee #1.

Amy’s husband, incidentally, was one of the few who studied at both Oxford and Cambridge. “We fell in love over mathematics,” she says. He’s a “very dashing naval officer” who just started a Ph.D. in bioinformatics and biophysics at UCSF.

Quid, which launched about 18 months ago, provides software that transforms big data sets into insights for companies and governments.

There, Amy prototypes algorithms and works with other engineers to get the algorithms into production. “We have these growing databases that are full of nuggets of really fascinating information,” she says. “I go to databases, pull a huge amount of information, and work to develop algorithms that bring out the structure inside of that.”

Her big project lately has been using semantic analysis to create a map of technology—basically, figuring out what companies are doing by mining different text documents about them.

“We run clustering algorithms so you can quickly understand the trends within a space,” she says. “I had been working with data and figuring out how to clean it up and handle the strange biases in it. I remember the day we piped it through and plotted it, the thing was beautiful, and it was a magical day.”

She’s technically on leave from a Ph.D. program at George Mason University at the Center for Social Complexity, where she would’ve been in Washington, D.C. building models of complex human systems. She started the program right when she found out about Quid, though, and had to make a tough decision. “At that point, one of the things I realized is if I come into the startup, the range of people and their skill sets are just miles beyond what I would’ve been able to have with the Ph.D.,” she says.

“It’s been an interesting progression away from the math that started me off,” she says. “I was talking to my mom last night and getting really excited about some of the things going on here, and she was like, ‘Wow, you actually really like your job!’ They’re both really surprised by where I’ve ended up.”

What she’s doing now excites her because, she says, “it’s only the last couple of decades we’ve had big data sets about human networks. There’s been an enormous explosion in research into what do networks actually look like, and it’s a really fascinating area to have focused on,” she says. “There are always more algorithms to try out and get your head around.”

She and her husband have taken to life in America with enthusiasm. She and her husband like camping in interesting places; most recently, they were in the Nevada desert. They’ve discovered places in the city with “spot-on” fish and chips and Sunday roast. They’ve also driven cross-country three times, either moving themselves or helping a friend, and each time they listen to a book on tape about early American history. “It’s inspiring to drive all the way across the country and listen to something about innovation,” she says.