Profile

Hello..! I’m Anabel – I’m half English/half Spanish, and grew up in Massachusetts, USA. I love all things outdoors: rock climbing, hiking, cycling, and rowing!

I’ve also been making pottery for several years and am close to finishing an entire tea set ☕, which I’m excited to use for the first time!

I currently live in Edinburgh, Scotland, but my family (mum, dad and 4 siblings) still live in America… we have 6 chickens that lay eggs every morning , and a cat named Sophie.

I’m currently in my first year of a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, studying why some adults develop liver cancer. Specifically, I look at changes to structures within the liver called bile ducts. I study the livers of mice that have liver tumours to better understand what is happening in human adults with liver cancer.

Before this, I worked in a lab that looked at “marine biodiversity”, or the range of traits we see in different sea animals. Think how different an octopus is from a shark, or a shrimp from a jellyfish! I joined a group of scientists on a research expedition to the southern Pacific, where we studied the animals that lived in deep-water volcanic ecosystems, and I even got to drive (for a few minutes) a multi-million £ submarine robot to explore the ocean floor, like the one that discovered the Titanic..!

Being a scientist can take you to some amazing places! 🏝

I do a lot of “bench work”, meaning experiments that require me to follow a set of instructions with special scientific equipment… I also analyse data on the computer some days, and spend about one day every week in an animal facility to perform experiments on mice.