Profile

I’m Thom, a PhD student living in Norwich.

My research is into how bacteria produce drugs that we can use as medicine. I love my job because it allows me to follow my curiosity and travel the world!

I’m basically as big a nerd as you can imagine. I love playing board games and video games and love reading about history!

Bacteria are everywhere. The soil, the sea, up your nose – you name it! Everywhere you look, a complex ecosystem of bacteria are getting on with their daily lives. In order to survive in these communities, they produce a variety of molecules, either as messages to communicate with each other or as chemical weapons to kill or hunt each other.

These compounds can be incredibly complex and require huge molecular factories to produce them. By studying these factories, we can start to understand how we can discover new drugs for use in medicine, or how we can redesign these systems to our own purposes…

My current goal is to get my PhD – to become a doctor. In order to do this I have to produce what is called a thesis, a body of work that furthers the boundaries of human knowledge (if it sounds scary – it is!).

In short this means working in the lab to get results and to build those results into a thesis. As such, my days mostly consist of working in the labs (culturing my bacteria, seeing what the produce, playing with their genetics etc.) and writing those results into a form other people can read and understand.

There are fun aspects to the job too though. Presenting your work is a big part of being a scientist and this, although nerve wracking, is very rewarding. Also, taking part in events like this to share my work with the public is a lot of fun!