Profile

I live with my partner in Sheffield and travel on the train to Manchester to do my research every day. When I am not at work, my boyfriend and I like to spend time playing video games. We have a pretty cool gaming set-up in our living room with lots of different modern and retro games consoles. My favourite game at the moment is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch.

I also love to travel and have made my way around a lot of different cities since I started university. These include Paris, Cardiff, Budapest, Amsterdam, Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Barcelona, Lanzarote, Sharm el Sheikh, Dubai. I am currently planning trips to Reykjavik and Copenhagen and am trying to learn a little bit of Icelandic and Swedish before I go.

I have ran the Race for Life for Cancer Research UK every year since 2011 and hope to continue to do so. I have been to Download Festival 4 years in a row. I have 2 tattoos, 12 piercings and often change the colour of my hair. People may think this affects my job but my supervisors, research team and the community of researchers I meet at conferences see my unique look as a sign of somebody who is confident in herself and her research. Often, the way I look is an advantage at conferences as the people who attend my talks or poster presentations remember me and my research due to my piercings and pink hair.

I am a research scientist looking at the reasons why people develop a specific type of rare blood and blood marrow cancers, called myeloproliferative neoplasms (my-eh-lo-pro-liff-ra-tiv/ne-yo-pla-sums) (MPNs). From this research, I hope to develop better treatments for people with these illnesses. I am studying towards getting a PhD in this field of work, which means I must contribute to the knowledge scientists already have about MPNs in a way no other researchers have, either by developing a new therapy, or discovering specific mutations in cell’s DNA which haven’t been found before.

To do this, I have to use lots of different equipment and machines which look at cells as a whole and how they look compared to healthy cells. That said, most of my work is looking at genes within the cells which control signals that determine how quickly the cells grown and how cells communicate with one another. Part of my job allows me to use world-leading proteomic technology at the University of Manchester. One of the most important machines for my research is a mass spectrometer that is able to measure all the signalling molecules released by the cancer cells by calculating each molecule’s mass and ionic charge. Using this data, I can determine what molecules are in the cancer cells, what their function is within the cancer cell and how this is helping the cancer to grow and develop.

Being a researcher means I can work flexible hours which is really great for me. If I have a long experiment to do and work late one day, I can then have the next morning off work or leave early. Research has also made me a lot more social as the research community are all a great laugh. People come from all different backgrounds and I have never felt unwelcome in any research centre I have worked in, despite the piercings and broad Yorkshire accent!

A typical day would involve firstly checking my emails and diary to look at the experiments I have planned for the day. I also look online to see if any other researchers have published their results about blood or bone marrow cancers, the experiments they did and what they found out. I usually do this while having a cup of hot chocolate (I don’t like tea or coffee). I may also meet with my supervisor and discuss results that I have found and she might also ask me to do some different experiments.

Next, I’ll head to the lab to check on my cells. Working on diseases involving blood and bone marrow cancers means that I have to grow blood cells in an incubator in the lab. The cancerous cells come from patients who have an MPN disease but I also have to compare these to healthy blood cells which come from volunteers who allow me to take their blood from a vein in their arm and grow their blood cells for the purpose of my research.

When the cells have grown, I can then use different treatments and drugs on these cells and carry out lots of different experiments to see the effect of the drugs on killing the cancer cells, if the drugs will have any effects on healthy cells and what signals the cells are giving to other cells when they are dying. To keep the cells alive before I use them, I have to feed them with nutrients every 2 days.

An average day can vary quite a lot depending on what experiments I have to do because some experiments may take all day and some may only take 1-2 hours. Sometimes I will be extracting DNA from cells to see what genes are turned on or off, other times I might be extracting signalling proteins and using the mass spectrometer. Sometimes I might be looking at the shape and surface of the cells using a machine known as a flow cytometer. When doing any of my experiments, I have to write down in my lab book exactly what I have done so I know what dose of drug I used or how many cells were killed by the drug within a certain time period.

At the end of the day, I will make sure that my lab book is filled in with details of all the experiments I have done that day, make sure all of my samples are stored properly and that the lab is clean and tidy ready for the next day. I will also have time to analyse my results using software on my laptop, and write these results into a report ready to share with other scientists, either online or through written scientific reports or presentations for conferences.