Profile

I’m a 35-year old scientist living in Edinburgh although I’m originally from just outside Glasgow. I live with my husband and baby daughter. My favourite things to do are listen to music (Foo Fighters, Band of Horses, Death Cab for Cutie etc.), go to the cinema or spend time with my family.

I work at the University of Edinburgh where I teach anatomy (the parts of the body) to medical students and also run a research laboratory where we look at ways to grow new body parts in the lab! I’ve just started back at work after nearly a year off because I had a baby girl last summer 🙂 It is quite hard to get back to thinking about science when you’ve been singing nursery rhymes for the past while, hehe!

There really is no typical day for me! Sometimes I will have a lot of teaching to do, in which case I will either teach in a lecture (usually to about 300 students at a time!) or help them in the anatomy lab where we use real human bodies to try and identify different parts of the body and the bits that make up our insides! If I’m not teaching I’ll be in my research lab doing some experiments or I’ll be meeting with my research students. We always meet to talk about their latest exciting results and to plan the next stage of their research. I also spend a lot of time writing about my work and filling in large applications to funding places – here you have to talk about your work and try to convince people to give you money so you can do more experiments!

Of course….my typical day now involves changing nappies and singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and I love it 😀