Profile

I’m Tasha, a 24-yr old PhD student living near Manchester with my fiance. I love cooking (and eating) different foods, watching movies/netflix and playing sport – badminton and ultimate frisbee (yes, its a real sport, yes, its awesome).

I used to do a lot of music in school and Uni, including singing and playing the saxophone in a band. I also love playing board games/video games and hanging out with friends.

So, our immune system is pretty clever and when we get ill, it will try and attack invading bacteria or virus to keep us healthy. Pretty handy right? It’s a bit different when it comes to diseases like cancer. Cancer is really sneaky, it comes from our own cells becoming mutated, so our immune system doesn’t know how to attack it.  However, there are a few cells in the immune system that are amazing and they can attack the tumour! This is great, but on their own, aren’t very successful.

The company where I work can treat some cancers by finding these special cells and growing them up to massive numbers in the lab, so when the patient gets them back, they work together to kill the cancer!

My research is looking at how these superhero cells recognise and kill the cancer and how to make them even better at it!

I usually get in around 9.30am and check emails, plan what I am going to do during the day, have a cup of tea. Most days I will then spend a couple of hours in the lab looking after my cells and setting up experiments. The experiments I set up usually run for 1 or 2 days so in the afternoon, I will run experiments I set up a day or two before. Then in any spare time I will try to analyse the results to see what they show. There is also time for chatting with my friends at work, sometimes about science, sometimes about everything else!

I love it because every day is different and interesting, and I get to use my science degree to figure out what is going on – a lot of work in science is like solving puzzles, or figuring out how to fix a problem, which is really cool!