Profile

I live in west London with my boyfriend. When i’m not in the lab, i love going on long runs in the countryside, but during the week I make do with pounding the pavements in the city. When the weather is a bit warmer I also love wild swimming- nothing makes me happier than being in nature. I love to cook, and my favourites are all types of asian foods… I could eat noodles and curries for every meal. My guilty (not guilty) pleasures are crime dramas and the Great British Bake off. My pronouns are she/her.

Lymph nodes are immune cell meeting places, where first-responders (dendritic cells) activate cellular killers (T-lymphocytes), to specifically kill the pathogen that has infected the body. A key part of this process involves the lymph node structure (made up of stromal cells) expanding to 3-4 times its size, to make space for T-lymphocytes to divide many times to produce a huge army of killer cells ready to fight the infection. If the lymph node doesn’t expand, the immune response will fail and the infection will be uncontrolled.

Lymph node expansion is triggered by an interaction between a protein on the surface of dendritic cells with a protein on the surface of the lymph node stromal cell. In my PhD, I am working on identifying the chain reaction of proteins which ultimately causes the lymph node structure to expand. I am interested in how very small changes within cells can have massive effects on a whole tissue! This project is also important because if we know which proteins cause the lymph node to expand, we have targets which can be modulated by pharmaceutical drugs, to either attenuate the expansion (for example in autoimmune conditions) or promote the expansion (in immunocompromised patients).

Each day in a week is different when you’re a cell biologist, as we have different experimental procedures which follow in a sequence. Often weeks follow a similar pattern, as we set up our cells ready for experiments at the start of a week, perform the experiments in the middle of the week, then frequently analyse the cells at the end of the week. The nature of the experiment can be very variable- eg. mixing different cell types together to see how they react, adding drugs known to inhibit certain proteins, or providing the cell with mutant versions of proteins to see how they change the way the cell behaves. The analysis is frequently looking at the cells under the microscope, or checking their levels of certain proteins.

I get into work at 8am (quite early compared to a lot of people working in my building!), and I first go to the tissue culture lab. Here, I will be detaching the cells from the plastic dishes that they grow in, so that I can use them for an experiment. I will count them using a specialised microscope slide, and put the right amount of cells in a glass-bottomed dish so that we can see them under a microscope.

This will take about an hour and a half. For the remaining several hours before lunch, I will spend time planning experiments for the next week. This involves doing calculations, thinking about timings and logistics and booking equipment- you might not realise how organised you need to be to be a scientist! I will also type up notes from my previous week’s experiments in this time, in case I did something differently to planned, or if something went wrong, or simply if I have anything interesting to observe. If I have time, I will read a journal from my long and ever-growing to-read list! It’s very important as a scientist to keep up with the work of other scientists in your field, and this work is published in journals.

In the afternoon, I might take some slides from the previous week’s experiment to the microscope, where I will take images. This usually takes all afternoon. I will later analyse the images, to quantify their shape, or area, or how much of a certain protein they have, or where in the cell the protein is located. I go home at about 5pm.