Profile

When I’m not at work I’m either sleeping, watching a film or in the park. I have a son who is 8 (in year 3) and a dog called Digby who is 11, we live near a big park on the edge of London and spend a lot of time there, I always take my camera because we always see amazing wild things:

Our immune system is made of of lots of different parts, mainly different types of cells which all work together to protect us from disease. In my lab we work on one special type of immune cell called a B cell which makes antibodies that can fight infections.

When we have an infection or a vaccine, our B cells start off by making antibodies that can do a pretty good job but are not really that strong. But B cells are really special because they can alter their genes and actually increase the strength of their antibodies. It takes a week or so but they can end up making antibodies that they are really effective at fighting an infection. Once the infection has cleared these “super-enhanced” B cells stay around for a really long time, sometimes for a lifetime and protect us if we ever encounter the same infection again.

My lab studies B cells to learn more about the way they improve their antibodies. We hope by learning more about this that we can help to make better vaccines (that could protect us for a lifetime) and also understand what goes wrong for some people who don’t make good antibodies and have lots of infections.

I work in a research institute which is part of a University (so I also teach students about immunology). The building I work in is really special it was designed with the help of scientists and has pods inside that school children can visit and learn about scientific research and see into the research labs:

The Blizard Building

When I am in the lab I might be processing samples; in our research we use human tonsils because they contain billions of B cells for us to study. Some children have to have their tonsils taken out in hospital so we ask their permission to use them for our research. We collect them from the hospital and take them to the lab, chop them up with scalpels and collect the B cells.

(in the lab, I won’t show you the tonsils…)

I spend a lot of time reading about other people’s research which helps me to find out important new things about immunology or to learn new ways of doing experiments.

I also have to write a lot, I write about the results of our experiments so other scientists can learn from it. I also write applications for money to pay for the research.

(at my desk, the orange blob behind me is the https://www.centreofthecell.org/

Most week I also teach university students about Immunology, this might involve giving a presentation or meeting with students or teaching them how to do experiments in the lab. Sometimes I give talks to other scientists to tell them about our research

(me giving a talk at work)