Profile

I fell in love with biology, especially genetics during my A Levels, so I decided to go study it further.  I did an undergraduate degree and really enjoyed the final year where we got to carry out a long research project, so I went on to do a research masters.  I took a 2 year break while I had my daughter and tried to work out what I wanted to do, but realised I still could not shake my love of genetics so am now doing a PhD in genetics, in a specific area I love!

My background and schooling did not encourage going to university so I did not know many people who had gone onto further study.  It was an adjustment at first but all 3 universities I have been to have been super welcoming and helpful with anything I needed.

I chose my PhD because it was an opportunity to do 2 things I love: genetics and computers! I have always loved computers and was good at IT in school, but never learnt how to code.  For my work now I needed to learn how to code.

The human gene is very long (over 6 billion letters!!).  In the last 20 years we have developed ways of reading it on a computer, but because it is so massively long we don’t open it like a word document and have a scroll through.  We write code/specific programs to zoom into the sections we want to look at in more detail, and then write some more code to be able to do comparisons such as “does this region look like this in a healthy person”.  I love being able to decide what questions I want to answer and being able to look for answers relatively quickly on my computer without having to spend hours in a lab.

Computational Genetics is quite a new field and there is so much out there to discover so I find it really exciting.

I feel very lucky to be doing work I enjoy so much and hopefully will impact peoples lives.

I will sometimes go to lectures to learn some more, or meet up with people doing similar things so I can learn more about my field.