Profile

After completing my Medical Science Degree at Nottingham, I moved to Oxford to do Cancer Research. I focus on the immune system in cancer radiotherapy treatment, it is a lot more complicated than most people would have imagined. 🦠 If it’s simple, COVID wouldn’t have been an issue!

Outside the lab, I cook a lot. I do mean it, it’s a lot. Nothing can stop me from cooking and baking almost everyday. I am a well-known ‘mum’ who loves feeding people. Guess what? I once won a baking competition judged by Mary Berry

Believe it or not, I also do what people called ‘extreme sports’. I am a caver who explores caves, getting wet and dirty, jumping off rocks, swinging about on ropes. Everything that my parents are probably not happy with. Besides that, I am also a whitewater kayaker, which means I play with fast rapids in rivers, my specialty is going down a waterfall in my kayak boat!

One of the most common cancer treatment is radiotherapy. Radiation is generally not good for your body, for example everyone knows UV from the sun is bad for your skin. However in cancer, radiation becomes very useful. Radiation kills your cells, and we can fire radiation to tumours to kill ‘bad’ cancer cells so they will stop growing. Cancer cells have the ability to keep growing and early treatment is key to better survival rates.

Although radiotherapy is very useful, it is not powerful enough to kill all cancer cells on its own. It is often combined with other treatments e.g. surgery, or chemotherapy (drugs)  to make sure no cancerous cells remain. If there are some cancer cells remain in the body, they might grow into a tumour again at anytime and that’s not good at all! Unfortunately after radiotherapy, not all cancer cells die, some just don’t respond well 🙁

I am currently working on the combination effect of a drug and radiotherapy. The aim is to test if the drug makes the cells more likely to die when it is exposed to radiation.

Usually I plan a whole week of experiments on a Sunday, just before the start of the week. In our lab, sometimes you have to book certain equipments in advance so early planning is the key. We often have specific timepoints to meet (for example, exactly 30 mins after adding a drug), so it is crucial to make sure both you and the equipment are free.

On a Monday, we usually have lab meetings, we will present our results, or analyse a research paper. It’s an informal way of exchanging ideas and allows you to reflect on your own experiments. How can you improve it? Can you do it another way?