Profile

I live in Leeds with my boyfriend, our flat is full of lovely plants (plant lady is the new cat lady). I’m a big time Harry Potter fan, I’ve been to Warner Bros Studios in London more times than I’d care to admit – it never gets old! In my spare time I write a blog about what it’s like to undertake a PhD and living with tinnitus (constant ringing in the ear).

I’m a second year PhD student studying platelets in the context of cardiovascular disease.

Platelets are small enucleate cells in the blood. What I mean by anucleate is that these cells do not contain a nucleus, and the cells’ nucleus typically contains DNA and coordinates the activity of the cell.

Platelets are critical cells in the blood and are very important in haemostasis. Haemostasis is the body’s response to blood vessel injury and bleeding. We need platelets so we don’t “bleed out” as it were. When platelets recognise the site of injury (e.g. when you cut yourself) they become active. Upon activation, they aggregate (clump together) and along with blood clotting enzymes, form a meshwork that makes creates a blood clot to stop bleeding.

To put into context, you know when you cut yourself and before the wound has closed, the blood feels “sticky” that’s due to the platelets clumping together along with the clotting factors.

Overall platelets work well and stop us from bleeding when necessary but in certain situations, such as cardiovascular disease, platelets can become spontaneously active and cause havoc on the cardiovascular system leading to thrombotic events such as myocardial infarction (heart attacks), deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or stroke.

In circulation under normal conditions platelets are inactive. There are important inhibitory mechanisms in place that maintain platelets in resting-state while allowing platelets to still become active when appropriate. In the platelet biology field we tend to talk about this being a balance between activation and inhibition, this constant opposition allows for our platelets to work optimally.

That’s where my project comes in, I’m researching the inhibitory mechanisms in platelets to understand specific platelet functions and the changes during and leading up to cardiovascular events.

When undertaking a PhD you don’t have set working hours. I plan my own time and experiments, typically I would have my experiments planned the day before performing the experiment. My day generally looks like:

– Get to the office
– Start preparing for experiment in the lab, get equipment and reagents required
– Run experiment (time varies depending on which experiment, but this will take most of the day)
– Collect data
– Analyse data using computer
– Plan follow up experiment for the next day
– Finish & go home