Profile

In 2004 (I was 26), I left my friends and family in NZ to travel to the other side of the world to see what it had to offer.

I had graduated with a BSc in 2001 and although I considered doing more study at the time, I really wanted to start earning money so I started working.

After a couple of years of work experience (which I have to say was with an amazing group of like-minded, young, newly graduated scientists), I left for London and started working for the MRC in the DNA Sequencing Lab.

It was only meant to be for 2 years (length of my visa) but I have been here ever since!!!

Fast forward 16 years and I feel like I have achieved my initial goal of ‘seeing what the world has to offer’. I have travelled to over 50 countries, seen, and done some amazing things.

In 2013 I married my wife Kylie (also from NZ), whom I’d met 2 years earlier and we now have two crazy little boys that keep us super busy from 5.30am to 7.30pm every day.

I love sport – rugby and cricket being my favourite, but also love just catching up with friends over the weekend.

Our ultimate goal as a family will be to return to NZ for a quieter (easier) life but for now, the craziness of London, with all its ups and downs, is the place we call home.

PS. I also love dogs, but Kylie said we can’t get one until we move back to NZ…. *Sad face*

I work with some amazing machines that allow me to generate lots and lots of genetic code to help other Scientists see what is happening to our body when we are sick.

Every one of us has a code inside our body which allows us to look the way that we look and do the things that we do. Our code is unique to us and we are given half our code from our mum and half our code from our dad.

This code however can change (mutate) depending on how, or where, we live our lives and can result in people getting sick.

Scientists are trying to find out what parts of this code cause what problems and how this can be fixed with certain medicines.

The more code that they can study, the more they can be sure of where the problem is.

We have many very expensive machines that can produce different amounts of DNA code:

This is my typical day:

5.30am: Riding to work

6am: Morning coffee looking at the DNA Sequencing (codes) that have run overnight. We have a big shared office so its nice to be in early when its quiet.

9am: If its a Monday morning we will have a team meeting and discuss which experiments are most important and who is going to do what.

This photo was taken before Coronavirus. Now we have to wear masks at our meeting and sit further apart

The rest of the day can be be a real mixture of things such as:

Training other scientists on how to use our special equipment.

Checking and cleaning our machines so that they run perfectly.

Meeting people to talk about their experiments and find out how we can help them.

Checking our DNA samples to make sure they are good quality and will give us good information when we put them on our machines.

2.30pm: Time to pick up my crazy boys: