Profile

I live in a town called Newton-le-willows which sits between Liverpool and Manchester with my wife Joanne and my two girls – Megan who is 14 and Gracie who is 7 and my little boy Cameron who is 3

My favourite food is anything Italian – i just love pasta!

I love The Simpsons but always end up watching YouTube videos with my kids! I also love music and have played the guitar now for nearly 20 years!! I’m a big Liverpool FC fan and sometimes write articles for LFC fan pages on football injuries.

I get the most joy out of teaching younger children about how cool science is and hopefully inspiring a new generation of scientists!

I work at the University of Chester as a senior lecturer in anatomy and physiology. That just means i teach students all about what our bodies are made up of and how they work. I also teach about how the body doesnt work so well when we get sick.

When i am not teaching, i am doing scientific research

My work focuses on the placenta – this is the place you and your mum shared important nutrients, gases and water during pregnancy. The reason we are all here today is because your placenta worked!

In some cases though, it doesn’t work as well as it should for a number of reasons and this can lead to babies not growing as well as they should.

My work looks closely at how oxygen gets from the mums blood, across the placenta to the baby and reasons why this may not work properly.

I use a special technique called perfusion which keeps the placenta “alive” outside of the mum after the baby has been born. This involves closely copying what it would be like inside the mum and its really really hard to do!

When the placenta is being perfused though, i can use special needles that measure oxygen in different places which tell me how well the placenta is at using the oxygen and passing it over to a baby. It makes a nice picture which looks like a weather map!

When we look at placentas from babies that havent grown so well, we can look for differences in oxygen maps to help explain the reasons why.

I helped make a video for everyone to understand: Watch it here on YouTube

I have also recently started to look at how our mums keep us safe during pregnancy and im finding out how important breast milk is for newborns.

In science, no day is a typical day! Its all so unpredictable!

When im teaching i will make sure i have my talks ready and saved and then go to a big room called a lecture theatre where there could be up to 200 students waiting to learn. Lectures often go on for 2hrs but the time flies by.

I also have a lot of meetings with students and other members of staff to make sure everyone is happy!

If im doing research work thats a bit different –

I usually get into work at 8 in the morning. I make up the chemicals that i will use for my experiments because they have to be fresh. I then put them into a water bath to warm up – this is so my experiment matches the body temperature of humans!

Next i will find out which mums are going to give birth that day – sometimes there loads to chose from and other times there is no one! One of our midwives will go down and tell the mum all about our research and ask them if we could use their placenta after the baby is born. If they are happy, they will say its ok to use the placenta.

I will then wait until they mum gives birth and i go and collect the placenta and bring it to the lab where i can set it up for my experiment. The experiment can take up to 4 hours!

Once its finished, i will tidy up everything (as its very messy there is a lot to clean!) and then look at the information i got.

On a normal day i will leave work at 4pm but sometimes i dont go home until 7-8pm!

For placentas from babies that havent grown as well as others, i will even be on call for it. This means i could get a phone call at anytime of day or night to come to work and do my experiments! It can be a long day but i dont mind because i’m finding out important things that will help everyone.

With COVID currently i have been working from home since March so ive not had the chance to do research work. I still teach my classes though but its very different doing it from home!