Profile

I am a fishy person at heart and have always loved water and the animals that live in it.  I have been a keen scuba diver since I was sixteen, and I even worked as a shark diver for a few years.  Diving has taken a back seat since I had children though, but my kids are looking forward to when they can start to come with me. I am certainly looking forward to diving in water warmers!

I am married and have three children.  A lot of my time is spent hanging out with them, we like to visit the zoo or the aquarium, the museum or the farm.  My oldest really loves pokemon at the moment so we have been playing trading card battles and watching the TV show.  My middle child likes to bake, so we have an evening a week where we bake something new.  Most recently, we have been learning to ice biscuits with royal icing, and made some halloween themed cookies.  When I am not at work, playing pokemon or baking, I can be found in a sports hall, teaching Trampolining.  I have been a trampolinist since I was 10, and a gymnast for longer, and I really enjoy competing and coaching others to compete.  It’s probably the closest to flying I will ever get, as sky diving is not something I want to try.

I also have a dog, whose name is Thorin.  He is my running buddy, and whenever we can we like to go out for a short run.  He is 8 years old so we don’t go far, and we mostly go at his pace of ‘as slow as possible’, which suits me at the moment.  I ran Edinburgh Half Marathon this year and I think I’m still recovering 5 months on, so the slower the better for now.  I started learning to sew a couple of years ago and I very much enjoy making halloween costumes for my children.  This year all three of them dressed up as Team Rocket from Pokemon and I had a great time sewing up all the costumes.  I like learning new skills and it feels like there is always a challenge to overcome while sewing.

When I get the time to chill out, I prefer to watch a movie or a TV show.  My favourite movie is the Lord of the Rings, and I enjoy watching stand up comedy if I dont have time to get a full movie in before bedtime.

I am a Named Animal Care and Welfare Officer, which is a fancy way of saying that it is my job to make sure that the fish in our facility are healthy and are treated well during the research.  As well as looking after the fish, I keep all our equipment running and the lab fully stocked and ready for our researchers.

My job also involves working with the scientists with anything they might need help on.  This could be setting fish up to breed, collecting eggs, moving baby fish from our incubator to the nursery tanks, and then looking after them until they are big enough to move to the big adult tanks.  I help with genotyping the fish – which is how we can tell what type of zebrafish they are and whether they are the right type of fish for the project.  To do this, I clip the tail fin of the fish, (don’t worry, we put them to sleep first just like doctors do to people having surgery).  The fish are looked after and the tail fin grows back in a few weeks.  We then run a PCR test (you may have heard of that in the news over the last few years). The test makes lots of copies of small segments of each fish’s DNA and tells us if the gene that we want to study is in the fish or not.

Another of my favourite parts of my job is breeding the zebrafish.  We do this using a tub of marbles, which the fish think are small pebbles and happily lay their eggs amongst them.  There is a lot to think about when breeding the zebrafish, as we want to make sure that the fish are as genetically healthy as we can.  This means making sure that we don’t breed fish that are related together.

When I am not feeding the fish, or helping the researchers, I make sure that the equipment that we need to run the facility is working properly.  This includes fish filters, microscopes, and even computers.  I used to order the lab equipment we needed to run smoothly as well, but our ordering system just changes so now I just bug the Facility Manager until he orders what we need for me.

There are a lot of opportunities to work in the wider university community as well, I am a member of the Technician Steering Committee, which works to make sure technicians have more recognition for their work in their labs, and I organise socials for the technicians at the institute I work in. I also really enjoy the opportunities for engagement with the wider community of Edinburgh and beyond, being able to share my experiences and the work that we do in the facility is a fantastic opportunity!

The best thing about my job as a Zebrafish Facility Technician is how different every day is.  There are some things that we have to do every day, like checking on the fish’s health and that they have water flowing into their tanks, and there are some things that we do every week, like cleaning out the fish filters, or testing how dirty the water is.  There are also some things that we only do a year, like scrubbing out the big water tanks to make sure there’s no algae.

When I get in at 9.30 (it’s a very flexible start time, which is great as traffic can be very busy), I check on the rooms that have the fish in. I need to make sure that the pH of the water is right for the fish, and the temperature and there is the right amount of oxygen in the water to keep the fish healthy.  Once that is done, I can check what needs doing for the rest of the day.  Sometimes it is a filter that needs changed, or a pH probe that needs calibrating (a fancy word for checking that it still thinks pH 7 is pH 7 and not pH 8.   Sometimes it is a bigger job like breeding 35 tanks of fish to ship the eggs to a lab in Europe.  I try to do the big jobs that may cause problems in the morning.  Problems can include leaks and misbehaving probes. Neither of those are a good thing at 5.30pm when you want to go home but have to stay and fix the problem.

After lunch, I can help the researchers with their projects.  It could be to do PCR, or to collect eggs or to set up a few tanks for breeding.  Afternoons are also taken up with making sure the fish are healthy, talking to the researchers about any concerns that I have about their fish, finishing any maintenance that I didn’t finish that morning, sending a few emails, checking that each tank has water flow and keeping the facility clean and tidy.  The last thing that I do before I go home is check to make sure the facility will be alright overnight while the fish are sleeping, and then I go home in time for dinner.

Because I work with animals, I do work at the weekends and we also have systems which check up on things for us and set off alarms if anything goes wrong. So sometimes, I do have to come in at 3am to check on something in the facility.