Profile

I live in Oxford with my partner.  When I’m not in the lab, I’m often dancing or doing yoga.  I teach salsa on a Tuesday night and go to lots of salsa parties and weekend events.  I also took part in salsa shows recently (front, second from left in the photo)!

I’m currently researching antibodies to foot and mouth disease virus.  We want to make a vaccine which works with all types of the virus and can be made cheaply and easily so it can be rolled out in poorer countries.  Understanding how different antibodies raised in cattle bind to the virus is important in developing different vaccines.

In addition to this project, we have a facility for visiting scientists where we help them speed up their projects with high-throughput techniques and give them access to human and insect cells which they may not have in their own lab.

Most days I do practical work in the laboratory.  The day often starts with getting reagents out of the freezer or fridge to warm up.  I then tend to check emails and reply to them and have a coffee with my colleagues.

Now my reagents have warmed up, I can start work.  This may be looking after the insect and human cells, or cloning an antibody sequence of interest, purifying antibodies or doing assays to test the binding ability of my antibodies.  More usually it will be doing two or more of these things at the same time.  A lot of our experiments have “gaps” where you need to incubate for an hour or so.  Therefore I do a lot of time management to use these gaps wisely doing other experiments.

In addition to the lab work, I spend time in the office organising visitors and answering their questions by email.  I also analyse data from assays or crystallization experiments which involves looking at lots of images to see if there is a crystal there.  It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

At the end of most days, I plan experiments for the days and weeks ahead.  This means when I get in in the morning, I can start work straight away.  Also as lots of the experiments I do continue for more than one day, it’s useful to make sure the time is planned. The last thing I want is to find it’s Friday afternoon and there’s hours left to finish an experiment!