Profile

I live in south London, which is where it’s at (no matter what north Londonders say). I love electronic music and baking, and often do both at the same time. I go out hiking and cycling whenever possible with my outdoor-sy friends! For some reason, I’ve developed an addiction for watching movie trailers online, they’re often the best bits in a 3min blast in my opinion.

I studied both biology and physics for my degree and then for my PhD, I really wanted to work with microscopes because they really show us what is happening when biology goes wrong and develops into a disease.

What I am really fascinated about is to be able to zoom in so far into the cell and its molecules that it becomes possible to understand exactly who the culprits are. This is however no easy feat!

A bit part of my work is about inventing the tools to do exactly this. Standard microscopes do not have the resolution to see what individual molecules do in a cell, so I build new types of microscopes to do exactly this. These new microscopes are complex, they use lasers, expensive cameras, electronics and they need to accommodate the cells that we need to study.

Also, often, the images that we obtain from these super-microscopes do not make sense immediately and we need to analyse these images with computers to understand what they tell us!

In the morning, I try to take the time to read a scientific paper in the morning so I can keep up with what other colleagues around the world do in research related to mine.

I then would prepare cell samples for the microscope. That usually means growing some cells and adding some color markers to them so they are visible in color in the microscope.

Then I would spend some time on the microscope looking at what the cells do, maybe changing some parts of the microscope itself to make it easier to use or to get it to give us better resolution.

Often, during the day, I would meet up with younger scientist like PhD students to discuss how their projects are going and see if I can help them with it. Other time, I would meet with my senior scientist and then I am the one being helped with my work. The people I work with can make a big difference to how I enjoy my day.

I try and take some coffee breaks and that’s great to randomly bump into other colleagues that I would not see otherwise if I stayed in the lab all day. We don’t usually talk about work, most often about what the weekend plans are or Netflix, but sometimes, we end up talking about our work and helping each other out.