Profile

Hi! My name is Louise. I’m a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Oxford, but I live just outside of Oxford with my fiancee and my French Bulldog (Bellatrix). I grew up on the north coast of Scotland but have lived in England for over 15 years now. I went to University in Brighton (for my undergraduate and postgraduate degree), then moved to London to complete my Ph.D. before moving to Oxford to work as a research scientist.

At work, I am mainly focused on researching the immune system- figuring out what goes wrong and how it can be fixed. My main focus is looking at how the immune system is dysregulated during arthritis and trying to develop new drugs to treat the disease. The immune system has always fascinated me and continues to do so. Never before has research into the immune system had such a focus in the world as it does right now (thanks COVID-19!!)

Outside of work, I love to spend time with my fiancee, friends and family. My dog Bella is the goodest girl in the whole world and I spend a lot of time (and money) spoiling her. She turned 2 in July this year.

I love to meet new people from all walks of life, so I look forward to speaking to everyone and finding out more about your interests!

Throughout my A levels, undergraduate and masters degrees, I was always interested in human Biology. I didn’t actually enjoy Immunology much as an undergraduate student because there are way too many cells, cytokines, chemokines etc to learn, but somehow I gravitated towards an Immunology focused PhD. My PhD was all about utilising small vesicles that immune cells called neutrophils spit out. Members of my lab had found that these small vesicles released by neutrophils seem to have an anti-inflammatory effect when they reach other cells, so my work was all about how we can use these small vesicles as anti-inflammatory therapies. Long story short, I was able to modify the vesicles so that once they were injected into mice they gathered and stayed at the knee joint that had arthritis, providing an anti-inflammatory effect where it is needed.

After my PhD I moved to the University of Oxford to work as a postdoctoral research assistant. Here, I am still working on drug development for the treatment of arthritis, albeit in a slightly different way to previously. My research here is focused on developing drugs based on cannabinoids (yep, you read that right, molecules that come from cannabis- AKA weed AKA kush). The cannabinoids we use aren’t those that give the ‘high’ effects though (the main one being THC), they are other molecules that don’t give you the high effect (such as CBD). We’re trying to investigate how effective these cannabinoids are at reducing pain and inflammation, and how we can modify them to enhance these characteristics.

Typically I get into work for about 9.30am. My work is about a 40 minute drive from my home so I like to try and miss the rush hour traffic. Luckily, working as a researcher in a University gives a lot of flexibility, and we can organise our own schedule and working hours.

I usually have my day planned out beforehand with regards to experiments I am going to be doing. Quite often we will need to book any equipment I will need for an experiment, so being organised is the best approach! My experiments range from working with cells to working with mice. Depending on what kind of day I have planned, I can be at the bench all day, in the animal house (where we keep the mice) all day, or only at the bench for 20 minutes at a time every few hours. The image below shows my lab bench that I primarily work at. As you can see I am a bit of a messy scientist!

Some days are shorter than others,  but some can be very long depending on what I am doing. For example, on days where I collect blood samples to analyse the immune cells, I will be working from around 9am to 8pm! This process involves separating the blood out into plasma and immune cells (see the timelapse video below of me doing the first step of this), then isolating the specific immune cells I am interested in before performing any experiments on them. An example of such an experiment would be to add a drug to the cells and see what the effect is. The drug will be left on the cells for a few hours and then analysis will be done to look at the impact the drug has.

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