Profile

I live in Essex with my boyfriend. I am working towards my PhD in space physiology at King’s College London. I also teach exercise classes outside of my PhD hours. I take part in a fair amount of voluntary outreach, where I visit schools and talk to students about what I do, and try and encourage them to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects at school/university. I also work voluntarily for a couple of organisations that are trying to raise the profile of human spaceflight for the UK.

I research with a Skinsuit that has been designed to recreate gravity in order to help protect the health of astronauts when they go in to space. The Skinsuit may maintain the integrity of many physiological systems and processes, and it is my job to attempt an understanding of this. I am particularly interested in how the skinsuit interacts with exercise, and any changes it may incur to our energy expenditure or muscle activity. It’s also important that we understand this, in the hopeful eventuality that the skinsuit is integrated with future space missions! It has already been sent to the International Space Station once in September 2015, and we hope for many more.

It’s hard to summarise my day to day job in one sentence as it changes all the time – which is the great thing about being a scientist! If I am running a study – which could involve asking people to exercise on a bicycle in the skinsuit – then most of my time is spent in the laboratory running the study and collecting data. Once I finish a study, most of my time is spent analysing the data that I have collected, and making sense of the numbers and creating lots of pretty graphs (or trying to anyway!). Then I think about planning the next study, which is mainly knocking heads with my supervisors and reading literature to come up with ideas of what my next study should entail, followed by lots of documentation for the ethics committee to make sure that they know that no one is going to get hurt with what I plan to do! Then there are the other random tasks, which include helping undergraduate students with their practical sessions, giving presentations both at university to my colleagues and at conferences about my work, attending seminars to constantly improve my knowledge, attend meetings with my supervisors about my progress, arrange meetings with other academics/professionals who might help me with a query/expand ideas for my research. I also spare some of my time for media engagement like articles for the BBC and TV filming for the discovery channel, and public outreach activities like this!