Profile

I live in a little thatch cottage near Cambridge. My current projects are working on a nano-aquarium with more than a dozen species of plants and animals, a camera trap for the bird feeder using a raspberry pi zero, and trying to relearn the guitar.

I am a postdoctoral fellow in Dame Professor Janet Thornton’s lab.

We look at human genome datasets from thousands of people all over the world and identify “variants”. We are looking for changes in the DNA that are unique to that person (even different from their parents). Each of us has around a hundred or so of these unique changes that impact our cell structure or function in some small way. Sometimes, these changes can cause disease. I specialise in looking at the changes in machinery on the surface of the cells that act as gatekeepers of information and stuff in and out of the cell; why do some changes break these machines and why are other changes are tolerated?

It starts with a coffee whilst I read new research in the field. There is then often a meeting with the team where we discuss how our research is going and what interesting things we are going to study next. Sometimes we are joined by our collaborators from hospitals or our research partners from other universities and companies. Throughout the week there are also various interesting scientific talks from scientists from all over the world that we attend. Of course these days the meetings are over video chat! The afternoon is when I chow down on writing and testing my code, submitting it to the supercomputer, and then analysing the data that comes back.