Profile

A senior research technician is someone who works in research but can be in any field. For me, I work in neuroscience, making me essentially a neuroscientist! My work involves maintaining and looking after the lab including the equipment, helping other scientist and organising and looking after the materials we use in the lab.

I also carry out experiments. The neuroscience department focusses on research linked with the brain and nervous system. Our aim is to figure out why diseases and disorders linked to the brain happen, and how we can solve the problem and find treatments to help people. So to carry out these experiments we find volunteers with a diseases we are interested in (e.g. schizophrenia, autism etc.) and get samples from them. Samples include things like blood and saliva. I work with blood samples, and I take the blood and use special techniques to take out the cells in the blood. Blood cells are small molecules that make up our blood and contain lots of genetic information.

I then take these blood cells and again using special techniques, turn them into a different type of cell called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). iPSCs can be quite complicated to understand but essentially these cells can be used in so many ways to study the disease the patient who originally donated had.

I wake up (usually running late D’oh!), get dressed and drive to work. I live about 15 minutes away from my workplace which is nice! I get into work at 9am and tend to settle down in the office and plan out my day. I check my cells to see if they are doing okay and then have breakfast (usually a hot drink and instant porridge or something from the local bakery!).

Then I go into the lab and do the experiments/jobs I had planned. Some days I can be in the lab non-stop for hours, whereas other days it’s pretty peaceful. On average I would say I spend about 60-70% of my day in the lab and the rest in the office doing computer based stuff (such as writing up experiments, reading, admin work etc.).

I try to get most of the lab work done in the morning, and have lunch around 1pm. This way after lunch, I don’t have much lab work to do and can take it easy in the office in the afternoon.

Experiments take very long, so I don’t get results in a day! Most experiments can take weeks or months! Also, experiments can go wrong, and sometimes this means staring from scratch again. So it is always a work in progress and requires a lot of patients and resilience. So the days I get results are usually the best days!

Also, as a technician we are expected to be on hand to help with any issues if they arise. This means you need to think on your feet and shuffle your schedule around to fit the needs of the lab. This might mean postponing an experiment to help fix a very important machine that just broke down!

I finish work at 4pm so usually get home by 4:15pm and am welcomed home by my kitten!

However, as a scientist sometimes this isn’t always the case and an experiment might overrun meaning I go home a bit later. I also sometimes have to come in on the weekend to check/feed my cells. But this time can always be taken back on another day!