Profile
Sarah Montgomery
My CV
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Education:
I went to Cumnor primary school, which is at the top of a big hill just west of Oxford, then the local secondary Matthew Arnold school. I studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield, then did a PhD in biocatalysis (that is, enzymes doing chemical reactions) at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, part of the University of Manchester.
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Qualifications:
For GCSE I did French, history, music, RE, separate sciences, as well as English and maths. I did AS level English lit., maths and all three sciences, then sadly dropped English for my A level year. I got a 2.1 Master’s in chemistry, and finally a PhD, also in chemistry.
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Work History:
My first job was taking care of cats at a boarding cattery in the summer holidays. Then the summer after my first year at university I worked at Starbucks. The following summer I did my first science-related job, a short internship at the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim in Germany. I did another internship at my uncle’s company Thermal Hazard Technology, which makes calorimeters to test batteries. Then as part of my PhD I spent 3 months doing research at Johnson Matthey, just north of Cambridge. I started at the Sanger Institute right after finishing my PhD.
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Current Job:
I’m a postdoctoral fellow, so a researcher with a PhD on a temporary contract making a transition towards leading my own research.
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About Me:
I’m a researcher at the Sanger Institute, just south of Cambridge. I’m a curious person, interested in lots of different things, but at the moment we’re trying to build new lifeforms from DNA that was made in a lab.
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Read more
I grew up in Oxford, and studied chemistry first in Sheffield, then Manchester. I now live in a small village called Hildersham in south Cambridgeshire, where I’ve been filling my quarantine time visiting the donkeys and sheep that live nearby. We also have an aquarium with six zebrafish but in order to maintain good work/life balance I try not to use them for experiments.
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Read more
Synthetic biology is a big area of research, which is about changing living things (usually very small bugs), and there are a number of reasons we want to do this. We might do it so we can learn how life evolved, or what makes something alive, or why something makes us sick. We can also do it to produce something everyone needs across the world, like antibiotics to cure infection or insulin to treat diabetes.
These days, we’re quite good at making small changes to bugs, but we mostly just copy and paste from one bug to another. We wouldn’t know where to start if we want to make something totally new, like a person with purple eyes. Ok, maybe we don’t need to do that! But it would be nice if we could stop people getting sick. Maybe we could make ourselves resist viruses so we don’t need to stay home all the time.
At the Sanger Institute, we read DNA, so we know exactly what set of instructions made a person. Then we can start to figure out why people respond differently to medicines, and to other things in their environment. My job is about testing these ideas: if we think this DNA does that, then what happens if we put in a new piece of DNA? Did it do what we expected?
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My Typical Day:
I usually arrive at my lab around 9am, and plan my experiments for the day (unless I’m already in the middle of something!) A lot of the time, I take some bugs out of the fridge the night before and let them grow overnight, a bit like what happens if you forget to put the milk back in the fridge. Then once the bugs are growing happily I feed them some new DNA and find the ones that ate it, by seeing if they behave differently.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Once our campus reopens, I’d like to organise a treasure hunt around the grounds as part of our regular open days!
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
curious, thoughtful, practical
What did you want to be after you left school?
a vet
Were you ever in trouble at school?
very rarely
Who is your favourite singer or band?
maybe Dire Straits? mostly stuff from last century!
What's your favourite food?
lobster
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
to keep discovering new things
Tell us a joke.
What did one DNA say to the other? “Do these genes make me look fat?”
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