Profile

I was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. I loved playing sports and done a wide variety of sports from a young age. When I went to secondary school and took Physical Education at GCSE, I learnt about how the body responds and adapts to physical activity and exercise and I wanted to learn more and that’s why I became a Sports Scientist.

From the age of 13 I started playing rugby, and have played for the past 16 years. Rugby has taught me so many things (teamwork, leadership, problem solving skills) and I have been lucky enough to play rugby in China and play at the home of Welsh rugby, the Principality stadium.

Other than rugby and work, I love baking (brownies are my favourite!), reading and have recently taken up embroidery (which is very fiddly). I live in North Wales and am lucky to be surrounded by lots of mountains, so when I am not on a rugby pitch I am usually up a mountain exploring.

My work varies from week to week and month to month, depending on what I am researching at the time.

At the minute I am working on an exercise intervention to get children to exercise more. I will read some research papers in that area and look at the things that went well and what didn’t go so well, I’ll also ask children what they like and dislike doing. I’ll think about what the aims of the experiment are going to be and what we need to test and make a plan for the intervention. Some of the questions I think about are; what exercises should we do? How long should the intervention be? What tests can I use to see if the exercise intervention work? What are the aims of my experiment? How many people do I need to take park?

For example, I want children to get stronger lungs, so I would do a test to check how strong their lungs are (see picture below). I will get them to do an 8-week exercise program that focuses on improving their lungs, and then after 8 -weeks they will come back and see me and I will test to see if the exercise made their lungs stronger.

I get up at 7.00am and have some breakfast. I will get into work at 8.30am and check my emails and my ‘to do’ list for the day. In the morning I am doing some planning for an exercise intervention, so I will read some research papers on that area and make some notes (what is good in this research, what is bad, what would have made it better).

After lunch, and a quick dog walk, I’ll spend my afternoons looking at some data I already have. This data is looking at people with lung problems who have done some exercise, some of the data collected include; height, weight, lung strength, how far they can walk in 6 minutes. I then think if ways I can use statistics to analyse my results and find any patterns or any exercise that worked really well for them and made them better.

Sometimes, I have to share my results with different people. This can be done via a powerpoint presentation, writing a research paper, or making a poster, like the one below.