Profile

I’ve lived in London since I started university. My favourite thing to do is read, particularly fantasy books (ideally with dragons) and sometimes I stay up all night reading even when I have work in the morning. Lockdown has been hard because I miss seeing my friends, but we have lots of video calls.

Apart from that, I like cooking and building theatrical sets in lots of little theatres around London (before lockdown). My favourite museum is the Natural History Museum because it has dinosaurs, which are awesome.

I work in a research laboratory as a postdoc, which means I finished my PhD a few years ago and now I am doing research as part of a bigger project with my boss and about eight other researchers, including other postdocs and PhD students. My work is looking at the human immune system, and particularly antibodies, which are proteins that specifically match different bacteria or viruses and can stop the bacteria from growing and making you ill.

I work on bacteria called pneumococci, which can sometimes live happily in your nose without making you ill, but sometimes do cause worse illnesses especially in little kids and older adults. There are vaccines available to stop people from getting ill, so I look at how the vaccines work and what kind of antibodies your body makes to protect you from the pneumococcal bacteria. To do this, I get blood samples from people (not very much blood) and measure how many antibodies they have and what kind of things the antibodies can do to stop the bacteria. My hope is to find out why some people get ill from diseases when other people don’t, and why people’s immune systems work differently.

Lab work is fun because I like working with my hands and planning things out, and it’s super satisfying when an experiment works! It feels like there are answers waiting to be found out if you know where and how to look, and I get to be the person who finds them out.

In normal times, I am usually at work every day but the hours can change because of when my experiments need to happen. I like being in the lab because my work hours are very flexible and usually I am doing something different every day. Sometimes I have long days setting up experiments (which can run for 12 hours or more), or short ones if I’m just finishing something off. Other days I have lots of meetings or interesting lectures from other scientists at the university. After every experiment I always have to analyse the data and write down what I did, which can be really satisfying if it went well or really annoying if it didn’t work.

I like being in the lab because I get to do stuff and move around, rather than working on a computer all day, although sometimes you end up working at weird times! During my PhD, I sometimes had to be back in the lab late at night, so I used to get my housemate to come to my work and meet me for dinner, then he’d go home and I’d go back to work for a couple of hours.