Profile

I live and work in Dundee.

When I’m not working I love to learn about other topics. I’m currently learning about nutrition and using food as medicine. I love to juice all kinds of vegetables and fruits and I recently qualified as a Natural Juice Therapist.

I like to go to the cinema to watch movies or binge watch box sets – I watched the whole of Prison Break (all 81 episodes) in 5 days.

I work at the James Hutton Institute as a Research Scientist where I am working on Gene Editing in crops using a new technology called CRISPR.

I’m lucky enough to work with lots of scientists from all over the world. In my lab we make gene edited plants using sequences of DNA from different genes. This means we can switch the genes off and on to see what they are doing and compare the plants with normal grown plants. This may involve crushing up parts of the plant to extract DNA, looking close up at plant cells with a microscope, or running samples through a machine to identify all the different chemicals inside.

First thing in the morning I have coffee with my team to catch up on what everyone is doing. Throughout the day I will spend some time on the computer checking results from our latest experiments, working on a report, or preparing slides for a presentation. I will answer emails and deal with questions from other scientists as well as browse the web for new publications of interest. At the moment I am learning all about LEDs to use them in our experiments. Some days I have lab work to do, mainly cloning, and the odd seminar or project meeting to attend.