Profile

I’m 26, from Devon, and currently live in Leeds. I work at the University of Leeds as a cryo-electron microscopy scientist (I’ll explain that a bit more in a bit!). I live by myself in my lovely flat (I’m a tiny bit of a neat freak!), not far away from the University.

Leeds is a great place to get outdoors and go hiking running and cycling, I try and get out and about when I can. I like a challenge, I climbed Kilimanjaro a couple of years ago, and am off to Peru later this year to do some more high altitude hiking as my sister is currently working there!

I use the most powerful microscopes in the world, electron microscopes, to study the protein machines that make life work.

Imagine you were a giant, so you could touch an aeroplane cruising at 30,000 feet. An average cell in your body would be roughly the size of a cup of tea. Inside these cells, your mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, would be about the size of an ant. And most of the protein machines that drive every process in your cell would still not be bigger than the width of a single hair. Hopefully this gives you an idea just how small these protein machines are!

Using electron microscopes we can directly look at these proteins. Using the best microscopes, and cutting edge computer processing methods, we can now work out what these protein machines look like, right down to each amino acid building block, and even each atom.

My favourite thing to look at in the microscope is viruses. The ones I look at usually have a protein shell around the outside with beautiful symmetry (they are icosahedrons). We are starting to look at protein machines and viruses with medicines (drugs), or antibodies bound. This is the beginning stages towards using electron microscopy to make better medicines, very exciting!

I work with a fantastic group of people. This photo was from last years christmas party where we all dressed up as elves and we convinced the boss to dress up as Father Christmas! 

One of the best things about my job is that its so varied! Electron microscopes are pretty specialised pieces of kit, so I help scientific researchers from across the University of Leeds, other Universities, as well as people from industry like pharmaceutical companies, to use these machines in their research. This means I work on tonnes of different projects (I have 20 on the go at the moment!). This keeps me seriously busy.. One day I might be looking at a cell, another day lipid ‘bubbles’, then a dangerous human virus. I love the variety! So most of the time, I’m preparing samples for the electron microscope, which involves messing around with liquid nitrogen (makes great ice cream too), or using the microscopes.

Once we have the data, I mostly spend time on the computer processing the data. This is a lot of fun, working out the structure of the thing you are looking at! Because this is pretty desk based, we have a LOT of tea breaks. I counted today, I had 10 pint sized cups of tea. I have a problem.

At the moment, I’m also spending a lot of time shopping for new equipment, and writing instruction manuals and guides how to use microscopes, and what to do with the data they produce.

One of my favourite things to do is take science out of the lab to museums and school events! I usually run 3 events a year. Here is me doing some chemistry (making nylon fibres) at the University of Leeds Discovery Zone, where pupils can come along and see all sorts of cool science .

Here is a pipe cleaner model of a ‘neuronal’ (brain) cell network that we made at Leeds City Museum science fair this year. This was such a fun event! Two of my favourite things, science and arts and crafts!