Profile

I grew up in town called St. Ives (the one near Cambridge not Cornwall!) and went to the local secondary school and sixth form where I got my GCSEs and A-Levels. During this time, I always wanted to be a vet and applied initially applied to University to become a vet. At that time, I didn’t get the offer I hoped for but instead I went to study a different kind of degree called Veterinary Biosciences, with the hope to do another degree in Veterinary medicine after.

Whilst doing my undergraduate degree I was really lucky to be able to do a year abroad working as a research assistant at Texas A&M university in the USA! This was an amazing year and I was really fortunate to have this opportunity as it really made me see research-based lab in a more interesting light and really started me on the course I’m on now.

After graduating, I took a year out to figure out what I wanted to do next and I started applying for PhDs. Fast forward to now and I’m living happily in Manchester with my partner and our dog and getting to study some really interesting work as a PhD student at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute.

Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) is a cancer affecting your blood system. There are lots of different kinds of cells that make up your blood and AML affects one group of these which are called Myeloid cells. Normally, these cells help to fight infection and are major part in your immune system being healthy and ready to fight off disease.

When they turn cancerous, they turn into a state where are they aren’t able to do their job properly anymore and start to grow rapidly -up to the point where there are more of them than the healthy ones! At this point, your immune system can’t function properly and people start to get sick.

I study the how and why these cells transform from a healthy state into a cancerous one. To do this, I look at how different proteins interact in these cells and the changes that they cause in cells DNA. If they can interact and causes change in the DNA, this can lead to the cell doing the wrong thing and ultimately is the beginning of their transformation.

If we can find out this transformation process occurs, we can then try and develop medicines to help fight it!