Profile

As well as being a scientist I love photography, gardening, and cooking. I also like reading crime fiction and watching quiz shows. I live with my husband and our 16 year old daughter.

I don’t work during the school holidays, so as well as doing plenty of science stuff at work, I get to spend plenty of time with my family and have some great holidays.

I sometimes get to travel with work too, which is cool. I few years ago I got to go to see the Chernobyl exclusion zone – but not too close to the reactor!

My favourite season is autumn, as it’s full of great times (Halloween, Bonfire Night and my birthday!), has amazing colours, is a good excuse to cosy up as it gets colder and darker, and on top of all that it’s got all the excitement of starting to think about Christmas!

UKHSA protects and improves the nation’s health and wellbeing. As part of this, my department works to improve understanding about protecting people from the risks of radiation, and gives out expert information and advice to the regulators, government, and public on how to keep people safe from radiation.

Part of my job is looking at what could happen if there was an accident involving radiation, how to keep people safe if an accident did occur, and how to clean up after an accident. I have also been working recently on learning how actions taken to protect people can sometimes have unexpected impacts.

When I can I like to get involved with science outreach work. I’ve been to science fairs, and get involved with some local schools.

A lot of my work is based round looking at published information on a given subject and deciding how best to use or present this information. Sometimes this is straightforward, but sometimes you have t0 “think outside the box”. Research may mean doing some calculations, or using a computer program. Some pieces of work involve trips out to find out about other peoples’ work which is always interesting.

A big part of my work is communicating my findings. This normally means writing a summary and detailed information on what I’ve found out, and presenting any measurements or calculations with conclusions about what it all means. Often recommendations are aso needed for what should be done next

Pretty much all my work gets discussed with colleagues, to get ideas and suggestions about how to make it even better. So while a typical day will have lots of time at the computer, there will also be some time in the library, and some time in meetings. And of course there are always emails to answer!

I’ve had some great chances to travel to meetings overseas, which can be cool to do. I’ve been lucky to go to Belarus and Chernobyl, Slovenia, Luxemburg, Austria, Spain, Belgium, Paris, and Berlin.