Profile

I grew up in an area in Scotland where a lot of the people didn’t have a lot of money, my family included. For a long time I always thought “I could never be a scientist” because most of the people I grew up with didn’t really seem to have big goals or if they did, they were a bit like me and never thought they’d be able to achieve them.

When I left school I got a job in a call centre, you know those places your parents call up and get really grumpy with because they are on hold for ages and then don’t get their question answered? Yeah, one of those.

I became a parent and after one of my children was super brave I decided that I could be that brave and decided to reach for my goals. Long story short, I worked REALLY hard and got a university degree in microbiology (so I know a lot about bacteria and some of the cool jobs they do) and then I started a PhD because I thought it would be really cool if people called me Dr!

I have 2 children, one of them is around your age (11), who think I am seriously embarrassing, especially when I come to their school to do science stuff! I also have 2 dogs that come to work with me, their names are Isla and Wicket (like the Ewok from star wars). This is Wicket:

In my spare time I do lots of random things like stand up comedy (which is very fun but also VERY scary), riding motorbikes  and roller derby – my roller derby name is “princess troublegum”. I also do a lot of science activities with schools and at fun days.

Did you know that plants are a little bit like humans? Humans have a gut (your stomach and intestines etc) and it’s the place in your body that absorbs water and nutrients and vitamins from the food you eat.

Now for 2 crazy facts:

Fact 1: Your gut has millions and millions of bacteria living in it…and right now, as you’re reading this they are doing lots of jobs to help you to stay healthy like getting nutrients out of foods and helping your body to defend against bad bacteria that can make you ill

Fact 2: Plants also have guts…well sort of. Plants have roots that are underground in the soil. The roots absorb water and lots of nutrients from the soil and they also have millions of bacteria living around them that help the plant to stay healthy.

My job is to find out what bacteria live around plant roots (the rhizosphere microbiome) and to work out what cool jobs they do to help the plants. So I spend a lot of my time up to my elbows in mud or looking at petri dishes filled with bacteria (that are often quite smelly). Here is a typical petri dish I will work with in the lab, each of those circles/ blobs contains thousands of bacteria….cool!

The reason it’s important to understand the jobs bacteria can do to help plants is because just now farmers have to use lots of chemicals to help plants to grow and to stop them getting unwell, the problem with this is that these chemicals are really bad for the environment. I am trying to work out a way that we can give plants helpful bacteria so that they don’t need farmers to use so much chemicals which will be better for the environment and might even mean that farmers will be able to grow crops in places where they don’t grow very well just now, like in some developing countries.

Here is a little video explaining what a microbiome is and why understanding them is important 🙂

here is a snap story of one of my days:

https://youtu.be/YoKX_1ClQ6o

Every day at work is different for me but most mornings are the same. It all starts with us realising we have slept in for the millionth time and running around getting ready whilst trying to make sure we all have a healthy breakfast….but sometimes we end up ramming cold toast in our mouths whilst getting in to the car (I wont lie).

When I get to work I check my emails and calendar and make a list of the things I’d like to get through that day (I always start by writing “make a list” so I know I can always score that off). I normally have lots of experiments going on at the same time. Plants take quite a long time to grow so it means I can set up quite a few different things and just do little bits and bobs every few days. I divide my day by doing experiment stuff in the morning which can be anything from getting DNA out of bacteria to filling up 100 pots with soil or writing computer code…. I also sometimes get in trouble for listening to music when I’m in the lab:

In the afternoons I try my best to make sure I have read about someone elses research or go to a lecture where someone talks about the work they do. I also have reports to write and sometimes I have to apply to different places for money to travel to conferences. I also have to give talks to the university about my experiments and once a week I teach students how to do things in a lab which is really good fun.

Once my day at work is done I go home and then take my children to their sports lessons and do homework with them. After allllll of that, we will chill out for an hour and play some games or watch something stupid on tv.