Profile

I grew up in a small town in the Northwest of England called Macclesfield, but have been moving around the UK since I was 18. I first went to Durham, then London and now Oxford!

Aside from my interest in science, when I was younger, I used to be very sporty and played football for a local team and my school. As I got older, I stopped playing football but I’m still a big fan of sports and regularly watch football matches (I’m a fan of Liverpool and my local team Macclesfield FC), NFL, and Formula 1.

I’m passionate about food: I love trying new foods and learning to cook different recipes, from different places around the world. My latest passion is trying indoor gardening. I have recently planted three bonsai trees and I’m very excited to see them grow!

In the body, growth of cells is a very well controlled process and it involves the careful work of proteins, which are molecules produced from the information in the DNA present in our cells. Throughout our lives occasional, small changes (mutations) can be introduced to the DNA of a single, or small number of, cells. Most of the time this will not cause any issues, but sometimes (especially if a few mutations occur in the same cell) it can lead to uncontrollable growth of the cell due to a loss of control of the processes that limit growth. This uncontrolled growth can lead to the cells starting to move to other areas of the body where they should not be, which is known as cancer.

Not all mutations will cause cancer, and in fact when looking at cancers from the same organs but in different patients we find similarities in the mutations that are present in the DNA. The work of my PhD has been focussed on looking at a few mutations that occur commonly in uterine cancers. The mutations I’m interested in occur in regions that provide the information for how to make a protein, which has an important job in helping to control cell growth. I’m interested in better understanding how these mutations change the ability of the protein to its job. Hopefully understanding this better will allow us to improve the treatment of patients with uterine cancers.

The days working in the lab can be quite varied depending on what experiments I need to perform. Some days I will be working in the lab itself for most of the day (except for lunch and some coffee breaks). On other days I might spend most of the day working on my computer,  reading about the work that has been peformed by other researchers around the world or analysing the data from the experiments I have performed.