Profile

I’m in the 3^rd year of my PhD (out of 4 years) at UEA, in Norwich. I grew up in Luton with my mum and younger sister and brother. We had lots of pets: 21 gerbils, 6 cats, a rabbit, a guinea pig, and 4 fish!! My family now have 2 cats, a dog, 3 gerbils, and a snake…….My family basically owns a miniature zoo.

To relax I enjoy baking all sorts of goodies and when I’m not treating myself to baked goods, I’m off playing sports. Exercise is an essential part of my life and I would feel lost without it! I especially love netball, running, and pole fitness. I have medals for competing in all 3 and love the thrill of being part of a sporting competition!!

I adore traveling and love to jump on a plane whenever I get a chance! I enjoy visiting places where I can be involved in water sports, hikes, and of course lazing the beach (not too long though as I burn haha). One of my favourite countries is Kenya, in Africa, I lived there for three months and fell in love with the beaches, markets, and of course the safari (I love elephants and cried when I saw them as I was so happy).

The Language of Life!

DNA can be referred to as the language of life as it is made up of 4 building blocks: Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine, which are known as A, T, G, and C. These four letters are the alphabet of DNA and the order they are put in changes what they mean. The order of these bases will determine if you’re a bird, a worm, a plant, or even a human! Their order also tells us even more about you like how tall you can be, the colour of your eyes, and the colour of your hair!

If I gave your whole school class, the exact same Lego pieces its likely you will all make something different because the Lego pieces can make many different shapes from the same pieces. DNA is similar, it is normally shown as a twisted ladder but it can form SECRET DNA STRUCTURES! I work on one of these secret structures and it’s called an i-Motif, it looks like a knot!

I am trying to understand what this structure does in the body! They look like they are important for turning genes on or off. Genes are sequences of the DNA building blocks that contain instructions for one part of our body, so if we were talking about Lego the gene would be all the pieces that made up the roof of the house. Meaning i-Motif’s they act like a light switch of control in our body for example telling the body to form fingers when we are growing in our mothers bellies, telling us to grow or to stop growing, telling our body to produce fighter cells to protect us from bad bacteria and viruses (like the corona virus). It’s really important we understand what i-motifs are doing in the body because they have been linked to diseases like: diabetes and cancer! If we understand what they turn on and off it can help us understand how to fix these diseases!

I have a lot of flexibility as a PhD researcher. I’m in charge of my own time and planning of my days. Every Monday morning, I have a team meeting the other researchers in my group were we discuss our work and help each other overcome problems as well as celebrating everyone’s successes! Then I make a plan a plan for the week, I decide what experiments I want to run, preparation I need to do, and then I pencil in any other commitments like presentations. I find I need to plan my week as it keeps me focused and helps me achieve something every week!

My days really vary depending on the experiments I need to run meaning some days I’m in at 7 am and leave around 10 pm (these days are the worst, I’m always super tired after these). But giving myself rest is important so after long days I quite like to take an afternoon off to have lunch in town. I generally run multiple experiments at once as it means I get more data per day and I get to use my time more effectively. However, this takes carefully planning and if an experiment doesn’t work this can lead to me needing to change my entire week!

Other days I don’t spend anytime in the lab, I may be doing analysis, but I do try to do this between experiments as I don’t enjoy sitting at a desk all day. It’s more likely I have taken time out to work on presenting my data in PowerPoints, posters, diagrams, pictures, talks and any other format I can find! I really enjoy this aspect of my work which has led to my newest project where I am designing a DNA board game!!