Profile

I live in Cambridge since 1.5 years. I love to cook and try out new recipes, and new ingredients from different countries. I have a passion for plants and nature, and currently have 26 potted plants in my apartment. I have a thing for organising, so you can always find me with a list either on paper or on my phone.

I work with two types of DNA which are found in different places of the cell. I am curious to understand how these two DNAs communicate with each other, and how that can affect the chances people have to get some diseases. Depending on the information that we find in people’s DNA, we can estimate whether they are likely to get a disease, or have an allergy to something, and even guess what age they have. But during life, the DNA can change, and I am curious to find out how the DNA changes, what causes it to change, and what will this change do to us.

To do this, I work with cells from patients, and cells from mice. Doctors get tiny pieces of tissue from patients (with their consent, of course), and we can grow this little bit of tissue in the lab. From this, I can take out the DNA, which will be a similar DNA to the patient where it came from, and I can use some chemicals to tag with colours some of the changes happening to the DNA. Then I can look at these colours, and I can compare the intensity of the colours or the different colours, and I can make conclusions from this.

I am not a morning person, but I do my best to get out of bed before 8am. Then I have my breakfast, shower, and cycle to work.

At work, I have a calendar with the things I have to do on that day. And that usually involves starting with a cup of tea reading papers that will inspire me on experiments that I want to do. Then I need to go warm up my biology equipment. The thing is that I grow cells, and cells like to be kept in the warmth. You know how your normal body temperature is around 37C? Well, the cells I work with also like to be kept at 37C…

I spend a good time playing with these cells, testing whether they like or dislike different things that I do to them. Then, I collect their DNA, and spend time tagging different colours to different bits of the DNA. These are the bits that should look different depending on how I treat my cells. But DNA is very small, and so the colours will be very faint to see with my eyes. For that, I use special machines that can zoom in so much that I can measure and compare different colours and intensities on the DNA. On a good day, I will end up with either some cool pictures with different colours, or I will end up with a big table filled with numbers. And I will have to go back to my desk and analyse these pretty pictures and numbers, and see if I made any interesting discoveries.