Profile
Leo Swadling
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About Me:
I am a scientist studying the immune system (immunologist) 👨🔬🧪🔬🧬 working at University College London🏛️ and I am really interested in vaccines💉, how your body recognises and kills viruses🧫🧽 and other things that make you ill! 🤒😷🤧
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I am from Oxford but I moved to London 4 years ago. I like sport (doing and watching), football is the best, but also hiking, tennis and cycling! I love music and festivals and going to see comedy and theatre, so London is a great place to live. I read a lot of books and I have a garden centres worth of houseplants in my house which I spend time trying to keep alive 😉
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My pronouns are:
hi/him
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My Work:
I study the specific immune cells in your body that recognise viruses and cancers – how they work, which part of the virus they recognise, what they eat (their metabolism), how can we use this info to make vaccines!
Vaccines work by showing your immune system what a virus looks like so that when you are exposed to the virus the immune system recognises it straight away and stops it from replicating in you and making you ill. It gives your immune system the head start.
Viruses are very good at changing their shape to avoid the immune system. I am working to try to design vaccines to target the achilles heel of viruses, the part of the virus that is so essential it being able to survive and replicate that it can’t change it so it can’t ‘mutate’ to hide from the immune system.
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My Typical Day:
What I like the most about being a scientist is every day is different and I am always having to learn new things! So I really don’t have a typical work day.
I am my own boss and I get to decide what to work on and what unanswered question I want to try to try to answer. I spend lots of time thinking, reading and talking about science with lovely smart people.
I always cycle to and from the lab, to the centre of London. I always have a coffee (essential) and plan the days experiments or analysis. See below for a list of things I can do in a work day…
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Some of the things I do:
- Experiments: I work on human samples, mainly blood (as this is one of the transport systems immune cells use to get around the body and is a good place to find them) but also I am interested in the immune cells in the liver. I isolate the cells and test them, to see what they do, what they look like, how many you have. I use analysers, large machines, and microscopes to see and measure the cells.
- Looking at data: I look at the results of previous experiments, making colourful graphs and trying to understand what new things I have discovered.
- Writing: I write reports and talks on what I have found so I can let all of the other researchers know and get their feedback.
- Reading: I read other peoples work to see what they’ve learnt and to see if their new knowledge can help me plan better experiments.
- Teaching: Teaching undergrads and medical students about immunology by giving lectures or small group tutorials, or training students and new staff how to do things in the lab.
- Travel: To conferences to hear other people talk about their work, going to other labs to learn a new experiment or teach them how I do my experiments!
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Festival vaccine/outbreak demonstration:
I want to set up a stall at some festivals and at schools to run a lesson about vaccines and how infections can spread!
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Education:
GCSEs and A-levels: Matthew Arnold School, Oxford.
BSc in Zoology (!) St Aidans College, University of Durham.I then worked in a contract research lab in Oxford where I learnt lots of lab techniques. I then did the graduate scheme at the UKHSA, working on proteomics, molecular biology and immunology. I worked on Tuberculosis vaccines after the graduate scheme staying at the UKHSA. I then returned to Oxford where I am grew up to do a PhD on hepatitis C vaccines at St Catherines College, University of Oxford. I moved to London to work on unique clinical samples to study hepatitis C and B as a postdoc. I recently started my own research team at UCL designing vaccines for variable viruses, in particular SARS-CoV-2 and hepatitis C.
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Qualifications:
11 GCSEs: – including French, Geography, Art.
A-Levels: Art, Biology, Chemistry, Maths.
As level: Physics.
BSc in Zoology (!).
D.Phil (PhD) in clinical Medicine. -
Work History:
First job was a research scientists in a small pharamceutical company in Oxford, then I did the graduate scheme at the health protection agency (research done by the NHS) in Salisbury. I worked on vaccines for Tuberculosis there! Then I moved to Oxford to work on vaccines for hepatitis C where I did my PhD. I then moved to University college London to do my first Post-doctoral (after PhD) job, where I am now. I also got my first grant (which is where you say what research you want to do to funders like the charities and Medical Research Council and they say yes that’s a good idea and give you some money to spend on experiments, or they say no thats not a good idea and you go back to the lab and think of something better to do :D!
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Current Job:
I am now working in London on trying to understand how we fight viruses, in particular I study immune cells called T cells (because they grow in the thymus) and how they go around the body and find cells with viruses inside them and then destroy those cells. In particular I am trying to design vaccines that make your body produce T cells that recognise specific viruses such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C and SARS-CoV-2. I am also interested in what immune cells eat! Their metabolism. And how T cells survive in the liver where hepatitis B and C like to live, as this is a hard place for T cells to do their job because it doesn’t have much for them to eat and has little oxygen which they also need.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Enthusiastic, Curious, Precise.
What did you want to be after you left school?
Pro footballer ⚽, then pro cyclist🚲, then park ranger, then a scientist👨🔬!
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Nope, too quiet and geeky! 🤓
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Radiohead (I am from Oxford so no choice)
What's your favourite food?
That's easy, Pizza...
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
I wish to discover something completely new about the immune system, I wish to work as a scientist until I am very old, and I wish to stay healthy enough to keep cycling and playing football until I am very old!!!!
Tell us a joke.
Why can't ants get Coronavirus? Because they have anty-bodies!
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