Profile

I am originally from Leeds where I grew up, but then moved to Liverpool for university where I studied medicine. At medical school I got involved in some small research projects in the lab and also worked at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital where I became interested in training as a paediatric surgeon. The huge range of ages and conditions you would see amazed me.

After working as a doctor for a few years I then moved to Oxford where I started working in a job that balanced both research in a lab with training as a surgeon. I did this for 4 years and then went to full time research to work towards a PhD which I am currently in my second year of.

I live in Oxford with my wife and our cat, called Elsa.

The cells that form the bowel have to perform a huge number of varied functions, they also regenerate really rapidly. When this process goes wrong inflammation can occur, such as in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). IBD affects up to 1 in 250 people in the UK and the majority of cases get diagnosed as children, people with IBD require treatment with a variety of medications and in some cases surgery – but no treatment is currently curative.

The research in our laboratory looks at the cells of the intestine, and how they change their function in inflammation. We do this by looking at the genes that each individual cell expresses. This will hopefully find new treatments for IBD.

I am also looking at samples of intestine from very early in life – and trying to see how the diverse cell types interact before birth to form a “normal” intestine. If we know how this happens it may also give us information about a number of other diseases which affect children.

I find as a PhD student there is vary rarely a “typical” day and there is a huge variety in what I do. Often (when coronavirus hasn’t stopped me!) if I am in the lab doing experiments. These can vary from an experiment that lasts less than a day e.g. checking to see if a protein is present in tissue sample from a patient. Or it can be a big experiment that will look to isolate different types of cells from a patient sample taken that day to study their individual functions – some of these can last weeks with lots of pauses as tiny amounts of genetic material are amplified and cleaned up. There is a huge variety of other experiments in between.
I can also be involved in processing samples collected from patients in the hospital next to our lab. Or somedays instead of being in the lab, I work with the clinical team in the hospital treating children who are unwell.