Profile

Hi! I’m Alice and I’m a 23-year-old PhD student at UCL in London. 23 probably sounds quite old to some of you, but trust me… I still sometimes feel like a child in a lab coat wondering how on Earth I’m already studying for ANOTHER degree! I am originally from Leicestershire, then studied for my first degree in Birmingham, and now live in London! I still can’t decide which has been my favourite place to live…

My favourite hobby of all time has got to be playing the saxophone 🎷 It took me a long time to choose science as a career as I loved music, art and textiles so much, but I love the choice I made and can keep these things up as hobbies on the side. During lockdown I have moved home with my family and crazy cat Jack. We are passing the time by playing lots of board games and turning Jack into a TikTok superstar!!!

Sometimes, people get unwell with unusual symptoms and a doctor can’t work out what is wrong with them. They are referred to specialist hospitals with expert doctors who try and work out what is wrong and find the best way to treat the patient. These doctors often work alongside scientists, so that they can carry out testing on the patient.

You’ve probably heard of Great Ormond Street Hospital, it’s a specialist hospital for children in London. I work in the Great Ormond Street research labs to help doctors find out what is wrong with children who have rare illnesses. To find out what has gone wrong in their body, I carry out testing on the children’s DNA, which is found everywhere in the body and is like an instruction manual. If I find something unusual in the patient’s DNA, we can carry out more tests to find out why this might be causing their symptoms. Knowing how and why the body has gone wrong means that we can advise doctors on the best way to treat the child. If we find something very interesting, or discover a new disease, we can publish our results to share them with other scientists and doctors, so that other patients with the same disease can be diagnosed and treated correctly.

As I work in an academic environment, the working hours are very flexible so there is no set time that I have to arrive at or leave work, as long as I am getting all my work done! Overall, I probably split my time about 50:50 between the lab where I carry out experiments, and the office where I analyse my results, as well as reading about other scientists’ research which might help me with mine.
When planning an experiment, I usually spend time at my computer making sure that I have organised what I want to do in the lab, ordering the right chemicals for the experiment, and contacting other scientists who might help me to plan or carry out the experiment. On experiment day I like to get into work a little earlier so that I have time to make sure everything runs smoothly, because sometimes things take longer than expected, or might need repeating if they go wrong!
A very important part of learning to be a good scientist is making mistakes and learning from them, and I have made plenty of mistakes in the lab, some funnier than others! One time, I spent an entire day waiting (and hoping!) for a reaction to change colour from yellow to red… when it finally turned red, I got so excited to show my supervisor that I dropped my black permanent marker pen into the reaction, turning the whole thing black!!! Luckily, he believed me that it was red, but I still had to spend the whole of the next day doing exactly the same experiment to prove it. Safe to say that taught me to be extra careful with my experiments!
Once I have completed my lab work, (which can take anywhere from 1 hour to multiple days depending on the experiment), I will spend some more time at my computer analysing my results, and making them into beautiful graphs which I can show my supervisors and other scientists when we discuss what I have found. Most research lab groups meet once every 1-2 weeks to share what everybody has been up to, and anything new and interesting they have read or discovered. In my lab group, there are currently 7 of us, but I have worked in lab groups ranging from 2-20 people.