Profile

I live in Cambridge and have a teenage daughter. We have an allotment where we attempt to grow vegetables and have several fruit trees. We even managed to grow a melon last year! I love baking bread and cooking everything from pizza to Thai curry and Middle Eastern food. I no longer run much – I have an injured knee 🙁 but I love swimming and spinning (indoor very fast cycling, it’s a bit crazy!). I love Horrible Histories, in particular the amazing songs and have joined in some activites with Extinction Rebellion. I met the queen when she visited where I work (see the picture, you might think I would look happier but I think I was nervous!)

I work on the different ways in which our cells recognise dangerous bacteria and try to kill them. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells (!) and some of those cells come in contact with bacteria that are bad for us, such as Salmonella or Shigella after eating unhygienic food. This is usually in our intestines – our digestive system. For those bacteria to survive and reproduce inside us they must fight their way inside our cells, where they have evolved ways to replicate themselves and generate many more bacteria. Of course these infections are bad for us – think cramps, loss of appetite, diarrhoea and sometimes even death! So people have also evolved ways to fight off the bacteria. This is what I work on.

You can think of  it like a burglar. This burglar, let’s call him Shiggy, wants to break into a house and steal whatever is valuable. There are two ways that we might detect Shiggy, the first by seeing or hearing him (direct detection), and the second by noticing the damage that Shiggy caused during the breakin such as a damaged door or broken glass (indirect detection). I work on how our cells (the burgled houses) detect the bacteria (Shiggy) and how we try stop him.

This is the building where I work (with about 600 other scientists):

This is me in the lab:

7am – rise and shine

7.30am – breakfast (crunchy granola with fruit)

8.30am – cycle to work

9am – time to infect my experimental human cells. I do this by taking the bacteria culture that I set up the day before and add a small amount of Shigella or Salmonella (well, I say small but it is around 15 million bacteria! They are very, very tiny so that  15 million is in only one fiftieth of a millilitre) to the human cells for 15 minutes. The human cells we use came from patients many years ago who had a type of cancer.

9.15am – remove the bacteria and wash the human cells thoroughly. We now add an antibiotic to kill any bacteria that have not fought their way inside the human cells.

10am, 11am, 1pm etc the next steps depend on what I am measuring and how I am measuring it. For example, I will carefully remove the bacteria from the human cells and count how many are there to see if they were killed or not. Or I will prepare my infected cells for look at them under a microscope.

10.30 – coffee (and snack!) time

1pm – lunch: sometime I bring my own, otherwise I buy something in the restaurant at work (usually a vegetarian option)

2-5pm This depends on what is ready to be done. I may analyse samples of infected human cells on a microscope or do some reading of scientific magazines to help me understand what I work on or just to increase my knowledge of other areas of science (and there are so, so many!).

On Fridays we have our laboratory group meeting, where the members of the lab that I work in (there are nine of us) all get together and one of us presents what we have been working on. It involves some nifty Powerpoint slides and often cartoons of cells, bacteria and the battle between them.

Here’s what our Biological Safety Cabinet looks like. This is where we carefully handle the nasty Salmonella or Shigella bacteria during our experiments. The window at the front open up and allows us to place our hands inside to work.

Here’s  one of our microscopes. I use this to magnify the very tiny bacteria and look at them. For this we use different dyes that make the bacteria and human cells glow in different colours! They come with rather boring names like Green Fluorescent Protein or snazzier names like Cherry and Turquoise.