Profile
Eva Kane
My CV
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Education:
Primary school – Silverdale C of E Primary
Secondary school (incl. GCSEs and A-levels) – Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School
BSc and MSci – University College London (UCL), with a year abroad in Australia at the University of Sydney
PhD – Imperal College London
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Qualifications:
GCSEs: Art, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, History, French, Spanish, Electronics, Maths, English Language, English Literature
A-Levels: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, French
MSci (a Masters degree integrated with a Bachelors degree): Biological Sciences (Cell Biology)
PhD (ongoing): Investigative clinical research
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Work History:
2016 – Intern, Science Media Centre
2016-2017 – Publishing Assistant, Springer Nature
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Current Job:
PhD candidate at MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) (part of Imperial College London)
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About Me:
I’m a PhD student living in London – I love to read, do yoga, cook and eat vast quantities of food!
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I live in South London with three flatmates, two of whom I’ve been friends with since our first year at university nearly 8 years ago. We’re lucky enough to have a lovely garden and regular visits from a neighbour’s cat, which is making the lockdown easier. I do lots of yoga and cycling, and I’ve been trying to take up running but my joints do not seem to agree with it!
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After you eat a meal, cells called beta-cells in your pancreas release something called insulin. Insulin travels around your body and tells other organs like your brain and your muscles that you’ve just eaten, and that they should absorb the energy from your food and store it for later. In people with a disease called diabetes, they either don’t have any beta-cells or the ones they have don’t work properly, and this can make them very sick. We could cure diabetes if we were able to make new beta-cells for these people. In order to do that, we need to understand how those cells are made in a normal situation. Normally, beta-cells get made while you’re an embryo, and not too many new ones get made after your born.
To study this process, I use a combination of mouse models and pancreas organoids (mini-organs that you grow in a dish). In biology, if you want to understand how something works, you break it – in other words, you get rid of a particular gene or protein, and see what happens to the process you’re interested in. If it keeps working normally, you know that it’s probably not important for that process. If the process stops working, then you know that it’s probably needed. In my case, I have gotten rid of something called miR-7, and I’m examining what is happening to my mouse or organoid models to try and understand what its job is in making beta-cells. Once we understand its job, we could maybe then use miR-7 to help us make new beta-cells for people with diabetes.
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My Typical Day:
Every day is different! Usually, I would spend some time taking care of my mice and checking on cells, and then hopefully work on an experiment such as stainings to look for different proteins in tissues or quantitative PCR which allows us to look at how much of different genes are expressed in our samples.
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Every day is different! Lots of experiments happen over days, weeks, or months, and what I’m doing at any particular time depends on a lot of factors. So while there’s no such thing as a typical day for me, here’s a possible day I could have including lots of things I regularly do!:
8.30 am – I arrive at work and spend some time having a cup of tea and writing my to-do list for the day, making a note of any equipment bookings, events, meetings, or talks that I have to go to. I also check my emails and reply to anything I need to.
9 am – I might go to the animal house to check on my mice. We have lovely animal technicians and vets who look after the day-to-day welfare of our mice, but I still need to make sure that I know what mice we have and ensure that everything is organised properly. Sometimes I need to take samples from mice so that we can look at their genetics, and when newly born mice are old enough I need to set them up in their own cage away from their parents so that the cages aren’t overcrowded!
11 am – I could start an immunofluorescent staining – a process where you add antibodies to a section of tissue (in my case, usually a very thin section of mouse pancreas) that will specifically attach to a particular protein that you’re interested in. You then add fluorescent antibodies that will bind to those antibodies, and you can look at the location of the protein in your tissue using a special microscope that can pick up the fluorescent colours. This is a two day process, and then you have to have lots of time to look at them under the microscope.
12 pm – Lunch! I normally get up and have breakfast around 6.30 am and then go to the gym, so by 12 pm I am very hungry. I can chat to my friends and co-workers in our canteen, and I usually eat leftovers from my dinner the day before.
1 pm – We often have seminars at work, where a scientist from another institution comes to visit and talk about their work. On Tuesdays these are at 1 pm. On Fridays, we also have ‘work in progress’ seminars from our colleagues, who talk about the work they have been doing.
2pm – Isolating RNA from some samples. RNA is a molecule found in cells that tells them what proteins to make. By looking at it, you can understand which genes are currently being made into proteins in your samples, and that can tell you a lot about what kind of state the cell is in. Just isolating the RNA from the samples takes me most of the afternoon!
5pm – I set up a reverse transcription. Basically, I make the RNA that I’ve just isolated into DNA. DNA is very similar to RNA, but it’s much more stable. If I leave plain RNA in the fridge overnight, it will start to degrade and I won’t be able to do my experiments on it! DNA can be made from RNA and encodes all the same information, but because of some chemical differences, it’s a lot more stable.
6pm – I head home!
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What I'd do with the prize money:
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Fun-loving, positive, easy-going
What did you want to be after you left school?
I had no idea, to be honest!
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Yes! I could be very talkative and I almost always forgot my homework.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Johnny Cash
What's your favourite food?
Sushi (for a meal), tomatoes (for a snack)
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
I would wish for an infinite wardrobe of clothes to choose from, the ability to speak every language (or even just one other language!), and to have a tap in my house that dispenses tea at the perfect brewing time, milk amount, and temperature.
Tell us a joke.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. In the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up: "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce." Watson: "I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life. Why, what do you deduce?" Holmes: "Watson, you idiot, somebody's stolen our tent!"
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