Profile

I’ve been living in Cambridgeshire for the last 5 years now, I was in Kent before that, was in Uni in Bath and grew up in Wales – sometimes I feel like I don’t really belong anywhere! When I’m not in the lab I play guitar, and have been in a few bands now, but only because I like doing it, not for the money – I think you’ve got to either be amazingly talented or just really lucky to make it.

I like travelling, and have been to a few countries, but I’ve only been out of Europe once when a group of us went to India. Everything’s so different out there I spent most of my time being amazed at what must be some fairly average stuff to the locals. I try to learn some of the local language when I go somewhere, and besides learning Welsh and German at school (of which I can’t really remember much) I’ve tried to learn some Slovak and some Spanish as well. There are a couple of Polish people at work who teach me a few phrases – it’s good to know people who can help you out for free!

I’ve got two rabbits at home, it seemed like a good idea to outsource mowing the lawn to two balls of fluff. Most of my family lives in the West Country, so I don’t get to see them very often but I try and get down there as much as I can. They’re all farmers so me being a scientist is a bit of a departure from that! I get to help out when I visit though, I grew up with a lot of animals around so I like messing about with the horses and cattle.

I work for a laboratory where we test all kinds of different medicines, from pills to protein bars and inhalers to injection solutions. A lot of the things that we test are being made by other companies, and we check to make sure that what they’re making is OK. We need methods to be able to test these medicines though, and that’s where I step in – I help to make the methods so we can do the testing, as well as doing the testing itself, and helping everyone else to do it too!

As a lot of the things that we work with are completely different, no two days are the same, but any given day might contain:

Testing medicines;

Making methods for testing medicines;

Checking that the methods work so that we can test the medicines using the methods;

Fixing the machines that we use!

Analysing all of the data that we make;

Writing up all of the experiments and tests that we do.