Profile

I’m 37 years old, and originally from Eastwood, Nottingham, and I went to Nottingham University for my undergraduate degree, and also for by Post-Graduate Degree…then I left and moved to Edinburgh which I’ve lived in for 11 years.

When I’m not in the lab, you can find me hanging out with friends, wandering around the city with no particular purpose, playing computer games, or just relaxing and listening to music.

I am a drinker of tea, a brewer of beer, a maker of cakes, and cultivator (and eater) of chillies and all things spicy.

I’m both a synthetic biologist a lab manager at the University of Edinburgh. So not only do I do research, I spend some of my time looking after the lab, and the people in it.

In my role as a synthetic biologist, I combine pieces of DNA together and give them to bacteria in order to make them take up metals from a waste solution, and converted them to very tiny pieces of metal called nanoparticles. My favourite bacteria Desulfovibrio (De-sulf-o-vib-rio) is really good at doing this naturally, but we are trying to supercharge it to make it even better, and understand how he is able to do it. Annoyingly when he grows he tends to smell like rotten eggs…and also does not like oxygen, which makes working on him tricky.

As a lab manager, I help people with their projects, and also make sure all the equipment works in the lab. I get to meet and talk with lots of different people from all across the world and help them carry out their research….and ensure they don’t break anything!

I get up at 8am and am in work by 9am.
The first thing I do when I get to work is a cup of coffee, and check all the equipment is still up and running and the people are ok! As I drink my coffee I catch up on emails that have come in overnight, and if there has been any new research come out (mainly via Twitter).

10am – I’ve got my hands in an incubator pipetting bacteria into different tubes, spinning them at very high speeds, and combining them with metals and seeing what happens.
I do all this in my anaerobic (without air) incubator:

1pm –  Lunch and catch up with my colleagues to see how they are doing.

2pm – I’ll check by bacteria to see if they are still alive and doing something interesting. If so I’ll go and look at them under the big microscope to see what they are doing:

The microscope I use….it has many TV screens. And what the microscope sees (a bacterial cell covered in tiny black particles)

15:30 Tea time. Very important.

16:00 – Finish off the experiments, write up my lab book, clean up.

18:00 – Check everything and everyone is fine. Go home. Feet up.