Profile
Chloe Huseyin
My CV
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Education:
Loreto Secondary School, Cork Institute of Technology; University College Cork.
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Qualifications:
Bachelors of Science (BSc). I have an honours degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and a ordinary degree in Applied Biosciences with Biotechnology. I’ve almost finished my PhD in Microbiology.
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Work History:
APC Microbiome Ireland
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Current Job:
Postdoctoral Researcher
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Iām interested in what microorganisms live in the human gastrointestinal tract. We call these microorganisms our gut microbiota and it is very important for keeping us healthy. There are lots of different kinds of microorganisms including bacteria, fungi and viruses and all of these can be found in our gut.
I work in the lab performing experiments to see if there are differences in the microbiota of healthy people and patients with gastrointestinal diseases like inflammatory bowed disease (IBD) and coeliac disease. Since our gut microbiota is inside our gut I use tiny tissue samples (biopsies) and stool samples (poo) in my experiments.
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My Typical Day:
I don’t have a typical day, which is one reason I really like my job.
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I work in a research lab within a university, so I work from 9am until 5:30pm each day. I arrive on campus and go to my office and start work by switching on my computer and looking at my schedule for the day.
Depending on the day there could be patients due into the hospital, so I go and collect the tissue or stool samples. I bring them back to the lab and store them until they are needed for an experiment. The samples are kept in a special freezer that is extremely cold, the temperature inside is -80Ā°C compared to your freezer at home which is only about -18Ā°C.
Some days I perform experiments to study the gut microbiota, first I take the samples out of the freezer and defrost them and then I extract the DNA from them, DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid (read about DNA here). DNA stores biological information and the microorganisms in the gut each have their own DNA code which the other members of the lab then analyse using computers, so we can tell what different kinds of microorganisms were in the samples. This lets us look for differences between samples from healthy participants and those from patients.
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My Interview
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What don't you like about your current job?
Sometimes it's smelly! I use human samples (like poo) in my experiments.
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