Profile

I am currently a 1st year PhD Researcher at Barts and The London School of Medicine. My PhD project is a collaboration with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca (I’m sure you have heard of them by now as they developed one of the major COVID-19 vaccines). Most of the time I am based here in London, but I will also be travelling down to the AstraZeneca site in Cambridge to do more technical experiments (I’m really excited for this part!!).

My project explores the mechanisms behind cardiac hypertrophy – a condition where the heart becomes enlarged and more rigid because of increased stress. When this happens, the heart cannot pump enough blood around the body, which can lead to more serious conditions such as a stroke or a heart attack.

There are around 7.6 million people living with heart disease in the UK! That’s an insanely high number! On top of that, there are over 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to heart attacks – that’s one every five minutes! This just shows how important research in cardiovascular health is. As scientists we need to understand what exactly happens in the body that leads to heart disease, and from there we start to think “what is the best way to treat it?”. Our goal is to always improve the health and wellbeing of all people, so that everyone can lead healthier and happier lives.

A little bit more about my PhD project:

The thickening of the heart walls occurs for many different reasons, both good and bad. The official term for heart enlargement and wall thickening is cardiac hypertrophy.

Heart wall thickening may occur in the body to improve heart function. This happens during exercise and pregnancy. During this time, the heart needs to be able to pump more blood efficiently, so heart enlargement and wall thickening makes it easier for blood to be pumped around the body (yay!). HOWEVER…when cardiac hypertrophy goes wrong, it can lead to heart failure.

My project aims to understand what pathways in the body are responsible for heart enlargement and to also understand the difference between when it can be beneficial (such as during exercise) and abnormal (heart failure). Once I understand this better, working with AstraZeneca I will investigate potential ways to hopefully combat this.

This was my typical day back when I was working as a research assistant at the University of Oxford:

I usually wake up around 6:30am (I mean, I could sleep in but I take timeeee to get ready lol), have breakfast and head to work for around 9am. The first thing I do when I arrive is make a plan for what I aim to do that day, such as what experiments I need to carry out, meetings I need to attend and anything else to be done that day. Once I have made my plan, I get started with my experiments. I have lunch around 12pm (I always have my lunch break – never skip lunch guys!), before carrying on with my experiments and going over my results in the afternoon. I head home for the day usually between 5-5:30pm. Home time is me time hahah, I take this time to relax after a day full of experiments. A healthy work/life balance is important and it is achievable working as a scientist as long as you organise your time right.