Profile

My rats are named May, Sharon, Betty, Jane, Peggy and Maria. They are all named after Marvel comics characters. I love to spend my evenings playing and cuddling with them on my sofa.

I am a huge film fan and I love going to the cinema! My favourite films include The Lion King, Captain American: The Winter Soldier and Jurassic Park.

I listen to lots of music, mainly rock music, and I love going to see my favourite bands live with my friends.

Despite living in Scotland, I am originally Welsh and I am very proud of my heritage, particularly when it comes to rugby!!!

DNA is a template for all of the proteins an organism can make, and changes in DNA sequence between individuals can result in different protein sequences.

However, most normal variation we see between different individuals in a species does not occur in DNA that codes for a protein. Instead, it occurs in areas of the DNA outside of protein coding regions, which influences how DNA, and therefore proteins, are expressed in a cell.

We call these regions “regulatory elements”, and understanding where they are and how they work is really important for understanding how organisms function in health and disease, and how certain characteristics can be inherited.

I work at The Roslin Institute, an research facility which specialises in animal biosciences. My lab is studying where these regulatory elements are in cows, and how normal differences in the DNA sequences of regulatory elements between different cows can affect certain characteristics, in the hopes of improving selective breeding approaches to produce healthier, more productive cows.

We are specifically looking at a deadly parasite that infects cows in Southern Africa, in the hopes that we can improve treatment options and selective breeding approaches to breed cows that are more tolerant to this disease.

I am a lab based scientist, and I spend much of my time growing different cow cells in incubators in the lab. My day to day schedule is often determined by how my cells have grown overnight, so I make lots of decisions for my day first thing in the morning. If my cells haven’t grown well, I may not be able to complete any experiments and it will be a data analysis day!

If my cells are growing well, I am usually isolating DNA and RNA from the cells in order to look at how genes are being expressed.

I also frequently work with cow blood from a local dairy farm, where I have to separate the white blood cells from the red blood cells, and then sort the white blood cells into even more specific cell populations. This is a long experiment, and I may work very long days when I have blood to prepare!