Profile

I live in a village near Cambridge in England. I used to play football and rugby, but as I approach half a century old (!) I have moved away form contact sports and mostly run, hike or play golf to stay fit now. I enjoy holidays in the Mediterranean or hiking around Cornwall, in the Alps or Andes mountains, or national parks in the United States. One of my favourite places in the world is Death Valley, an amazing place and not as I imagined it before visiting a couple of years ago.

I’m a Professor of Microbiology at the University of East Anglia leading a team of 10 scientists at the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK. From a young age I was interested in how things worked in nature and particularly why we get ill sometimes from eating food.

Eating food is something that everyone needs to do to grow up healthy and fit. But if we are not careful about how we handle our food or if we do not cook it properly bad bacteria that are present in dirt can get into our gut and make us sick. Understanding how they get into our food and how they make us sick can be used to prevent the illness in the first place or make us better as soon as possible.

I mostly work on bacteria, very small things that can only be seen with a microscope and look like a small pellet or ball. Everyone has good bacteria in our gut where they are important for helping us digest our food. But some are bad and do not help us at all, and when they get into our gut they can make us sick. Washing hands and cooking our food thoroughly are good ways to stop these bacteria making us sick.

We not only work in the UK but also with scientists in Africa where there is much more illness. This is important to make people healthier everywhere in the world but also to help them sell some of their food to us.

I spend a lot of my day in exciting discussions with other scientists or teaching young scientists. Once we have found something interesting we tell as many people as possible about it, it’s a bit like story telling really. If we talk to the right people and they like our ideas we can find new ways of making our food that is safer that does not make us sick.