Profile

I am a third year cancer research PhD student who works at King’s College London. In my spare time I love exploring the outdoors and travelling to new places. I also love playing tennis and netball and aim to do both of these at least once a week. I also love baking and binge watching basically anything on Netflix!

My work focuses on trying to figure out how we can use our own cells to fight off nasty diseases that make us ill such as cancer. We have wonderful complex network of cells that help the body fight off diseases, and we refer to this as the immune system. My work involves trying to find the ways cells of the immune system fight off diseases, and then use these mechanisms to help fight off cancer. The goal of this work is to find a way to change patient’s immune systems so they can successfully fight off cancer using the cells of their own bodies.

I get up nice and early and have a good breakfast, and then I hop on the train to get myself into the lab in London for 9am. Once I’m in the lab I often spend an hour or so planning what I need to do for the day and writing down those plans in my lab book. I tend to do most of my practical experiments in the first half of the day, and this may involve examining my cells down a microscope or taking pretty pictures of immune cells in action. The second half of the day tends to involve performing calculations and making colourful graphs to show my findings! After work I like to relax by playing sports such as netball or tennis.