Profile

So….here’s more about me, as I’ve mentioned before I’m in my 4th year of doing a PhD.  In case you haven’t come across this before, in a PhD you study a section of a novel piece of research- this means that it is quite likely that you are either the only person, or one of very few people who are studying this particular bit of research in the whole wide world.  You are given three years to finish the practical work, so those are the times where you wear the nice white coat and work in the lab, and then you have up to a year to write up your work in a giant book called a thesis-that’s the stage I’m at now..  Some of these can be up to 50,000 words long.  As you can imagine these days I am spending a fair amount of time at the computer but when I’m not you will most likely find me dancing around in my zumba class, or with my family and friends in the cinema or eating yummy food somewhere, relaxing with a book or watching anything from wildlife documentaries to reality “trash tv” and everything in between.  I also love travelling but due to PhD life I haven’t done much of this recently.

I work with a nasty bug (bacteria) called C. difficile.  It’s nasty because it takes advantage of people who are already sick in hospital or those who are a bit more fragile, like the elderly.  It causes horrible tummy infections with the main symptom being severe diarrhoea which no one wants do they?!  This bacteria is becoming stronger and stronger and is able to survive and keep growing even after a patient is given antibiotics. Other options are being looked at to replace the antibiotics.  One of these replacements are little viruses that I work with called bacteriophages (we call them phages).  These are viruses that attack the bacteria.  Think of the cold or flu viruses that make us feel poorly….these are viruses that infect humans.  Similarly phages infect only bacteria and so the idea is, if we have phages as a medicine it will kill the bacteria making us ill and make us feel better.

All research in developing medicine or future treatments have to pass lots of tests in the lab first before it can be tested on humans.  For my PhD project, I have had to develop a way of looking at how the C. difficile bacteria and phages interact with each other when they are added to cells from the large intestine.  This is because we want to try and make a realistic copy of what would happen in an infection without using humans as we are not allowed to do this yet.

My typical day completely depends on what experiments I am doing.  At the beginning of my PhD some of my experiments were 12-14 hours so those days would be super long and involve the eating of a lot of chocolate (for energy of course).  More recently my days are a bit more of a “normal length” 9-5 ish. At the moment I am doing what scientists like to call “optimisation”, this is a long word which simply means trial and error until the experiment works.  I also have to do a lot of reading to keep up to date with the latest research so I try and do that if I get a spare moment in the day.