Profile

I am from a small rural village in Norfolk, but my family moved to Norwich during my teens and I ended up staying close by when I studied at the University of East Anglia.

I am a big animal lover and grew up with many pets, with a particular soft spot for dogs. Sadly renting a flat in London really limits pet options, but we do have a very greedy black hamster to keep us company.

Beyond the obvious hobbies like gaming and Netflix, I really enjoy reading. I rarely ever do my commute on the underground without a book to help pass the time. Although I have become a lot slower compared to my teen years, I still enthusiastically play football as much as I can. I currently play as a fullback for Alexandra Palace FC, a local amateur team with very muddy pitches in this winter weather.

I was hired to work on a project looking at an interaction between RSV and the pneumococcus. RSV, Respiratory syncytial virus, is the leading viral cause of pneumonia (serious lung infections) in children, while the pneumococcus (Streptococcus pneumoniae is its full name) is a major cause of bacterial pneumonia. My boss has previously discovered that a protein on the outside of the virus seems to be able to bind directly to the pneumococcus, and that when they are combined the bacteria becomes much more dangerous in a mouse model of infection.

Therefore my project is trying to figure out what exactly happens to the bacteria when it comes in contact with this viral protein, and why it might cause more serious disease. This involves looking at things such as how quickly the bacteria grows, if it changes the release of toxins, susceptibility to antibiotics, or whether certain bacterial genes are turned on and off.

One of the perks of working in research is that it is typically not a 9-5 job, you can be flexible with whatever work hours suit you and your experiments. As I am in no way a morning person that means I often get up a little late and have a leisurely breakfast before commuting to my institute. Of course the downside is that you often end up working evenings or weekends in order to get certain experiments finished!

My typical work is actually split between multiple locations. I am usually based at the Institute of Child Health, where my group has offices and a few different labs for bench-top experiments and growing cells for example. However, when I need to run an experiment involving live coronavirus, I have to use a containment level 3 lab at the Royal Free Hospital. As you can imagine this involves a lot more safety procedures which make sure that my colleagues and I can handle the virus without endangering ourselves or risk of it spreading. Before the pandemic, these labs were mostly being used by other researchers working on another infectious disease, tuberculosis.

As with many other jobs these days, at times it is possible to do some work from home. For example when writing or performing data analysis, or joining online meetings. But there is obviously no way to do hands-on lab experiments remotely (as nice as that sounds some mornings..)