Profile

I absolutely love photography – wherever I go I find myself looking at objects or the landscape from various different angles, always with a photo in mind. I take my camera with me everywhere, as you never know what you may see whilst out and about. I particularly love walking in the countryside with my family, exploring, jumping in puddles with my 5  and 8 year old and looking for insects, the more unusual-the better.

I became a stem cell researcher  accidentally, despite having an interest in medicine I actually studied animal biology, specialising in animal behaviour, insects, and their interaction with their habitats. This led me to applying for a job with the British Antarctic Survey to study sealion behaviour!! Once the realisation of just how cold the Antarctic is, I decided to stay in the UK and applied for a job as a technician at the Medical School, University of Birmingham, just to get me into the working world. I loved it there so much and loved working in the laboratory environment that I studied for my doctorate PhD and developed an interest in stem cell biology, so much so that I embarked on the writing of a comprehensive stem cell text book for students.

I have worked as a stem cell scientist for almost 20 years. The majority of this time has been spent researching blood stem cells, looking at a particular protein that is important for them to work properly. I use models that change the levels of this protein and look at the effects this has upon the stem cell. I have identified this protein as a critically important protein needed for our blood stem cells to work properly. When changes (mutations) happen that cause altered levels of the protein, diseases such as blood cancer (leukaemia) develop.

By identifying this, we can then try to develop therapies to put the levels of the protein back to normal or to counter-balance the effects that the abnormal protein has, in the hopes of developing better treatments for patients.

Recently I have developed an interest in how stem cells work in the skin. Looking at the same protein as I did in blood cells, I have shown that it is also important in the maintenance of hair! I hope that one day I may find the cure to baldness!

In addition to research in the laboratory, my work involves teaching University students during their studies, writing research articles for publication and recently the co-authorship of a major new text book on stem cell biology for an American publisher.

My typical day begins often early, with the pre-alarm wake-up call from my youngest child! We normally all get up, have breakfast and then hurriedly get ready for work and school breakfast club. We leave the house at 7:45, in order to get the lab before 8:30/9:00.

The first thing I do at work (after taking my coat off and putting the kettle on) is to head to the tissue culture lab (where we grow our cells), to check that the cells are all alive and happy! We treat our cells like precious babies (although we don’t sing to them!). I then sit down and plan the day, the experiments that will be done, what the research students need to do etc.

A normal day in the lab finishes around 4:30/5:00, however when long experiments are running, these days can go on much later into the evening.