Profile

I am from Northern Ireland and moved to Oxford nearly 3 years ago to start my DPhil (PhD). I have a cat and a dog. The cats favourite thing to do is walk across my keyboard when I’m typing up my experiments late at night. I hate running but do it as often as I can, love football but sadly don’t get much time to play (seems like I have that a bit backwards, right?). I’m really quite boring because in my spare time I’m usually reading some science papers or something related to my work. But I love what I do, and love to learn new things.

Our bodies are amazing, but sometimes things can go wrong. I work on cancer treatments. The aim of my role is to get genes into cancer cells using ultrasound. Yes kind of like the same thing doctors/nurses use for pregnancy scans, but the ultrasound I use is much more powerful. Our bodies have evolved to protect us from things that wouldn’t normally be there, and that includes the particles I am trying to get in to help our bodies. So my role has many different projects, one is trying to trick our bodies into not seeing what I am trying to deliver. Another is moving what I have delivered to where it is needed. And then being able to tell the cells to take in the particles when I get them there.

So I grow loads of different types of cells including cancer and try and get things inside. I work in an lab that has 20 PhD students and other researchers. Some spend lots of time in the lab and some more time at their desks. It depends on what each persons project is. But it’s a really fun group and we hope the work we’re doing today can help someone in the future. When it’s a really late lab night sometimes my friends penguin, Gary, helps out. You can see him in the pictures. Safety first though, gloves andd glasses at all times.

8 am – wake up

930 – Leave for work (50 mins on the bus – so will usually be reading or listening to a podcast)

1030 – In the lab – preparing materials for cell culture (to keep the cells happy and growing)

1100 – Perform cell culture – this has to be done every 3/4 days – every cell divides and we grow them in special containers. the containers have a set amount of space for the cells. cells will ‘double’ in the amount of them every 12-20 hours (for example). So if i have 1,000    cells, 12 hrs later there will be 2,000, and 12 hours after that, 4,000 etc. so to stop them from over growing I must take some and put them in a new container and give both new ‘food’ in the form of a nutricious media.

1300 – usually some food and a catch up with my friends in the lab

1400 – usually planning or running some experients until the end of the day. sometimes this can be a few hours if i’m only planning but when I am doing experients I might be in work until midnight or after.

Then it’s time for home and get ready to repeat again.