Profile

I moved back to Edinburgh for my PhD, which is where I grew up. I first went to university in York and from there did a year abroad in Barcelona. I worked in a lab for a year that was right on the beach. I haven’t always worked in a lab, before my PhD I took a break to work in the offices at Cancer Research UK in London which was also a really cool sciencey job -not all scientists work in a lab!

In my spare time I like spending time outdoors in the hills or the beach, even if the sea is cold in Scotland. After a long day at the lab I like going to pub quizzes with my PhD friends or chilling at home watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I also help produce a science podcast (called Not Another Science Podcast -go check it out!) for my university science media society EUSci. Learning audio editing has been a challenge but I’ve really enjoyed finding great guests and hearing what they have to say!

This is a video of stem cells I have made develop into different cell types -this patch has formed beating heart cells!

We all have trillions of cells that make up our body. But all of our cells have the same DNA which gives each cell the same instructions. So how are we not just a blob? How do we have lots of different body parts that can see and think and digest food? We start life as a blob when we’re in the womb, but then how do we escape being a blob?

This is what my research will help understand. I am studying mouse embryonic development but using stem cells, rather than real embryos.

The embryo is mostly made of these ’embryonic stem cells’. They have the power to become any type of cell in the body -muscle cells, skin cells, blood cells, anything. But these stem cells, like every other cell in the body, have the exact same DNA as fully mature brain cells or the cells that make your heart beat.

You can even make these stem cells blob together in a dish where they start to form the beginnings of muscle tissue, nerve tissue, gut etc in roughly the same place they would in the actual embryo! These blobs are called gastruloids, and that’s what one of the pictures is above. We can use them to understand how the embryo develops, but without using real embryos.

DNA is finely controlled by molecular switches that allow only some sections of DNA to be ‘turned on’ in specific cells. There are certain genes written in your DNA code that make a brain cell act like a brain cell. The switches make sure that these genes are turned on ONLY in the brain cells so that your skin doesn’t start becoming a brain.

The molecular switches in stem cells are specially tuned to allow the stem cells to keep their power of being able to become any cell type they want to be. My research will look at what happens to these molecular switches to allow the stem cells to start their journeys towards becoming another type of cell and helping the embryo become more than just a blob.