Profile

I grew up and spent most of my life in Australia. My home town is Newcastle (we have a lot of places named after UK cities). I went to both high school and university in Newcastle, studying biomedical science for my bachelors and doing a PhD in medical genetics. I went into university knowing I wanted to do medical research. I was always interested in science, in particular human biology, and wanted a job that would involve problem solving, wouldn’t be the same every day, and where my work might be able to make an impact.

I moved to the UK four years ago, to work in my current job in Manchester, a lot of people tell me I’m crazy for leaving sunny Australia for rainy Manchester but I have loved it so far. Research is a great career for working almost anywhere in the world, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to work in Europe.

Outside of work I have had an interest in art since I was young, and love to paint and draw. I often combine my interest in both science and art in my works sometimes taking inspiration from my research, anatomy and the natural world.

I also enjoy travelling, and working in research has been great for that. During my PhD I was luck enough to travel around the USA for different conferences and see a lot of the country.

I work in skin cancer, both in melanoma (the ones that look like moles) and non-melanoma skin cancer. We know that sun damage and sunburn cause skin cancer to develop, but my research looks at how the sun damage to the normal skin surrounding the cancer will also affect the cancers growth.

I focus in particular on a type of cell called Fibroblasts. These are the cells responsible for producing Collagen, a protein that makes up most of your skin. When you get older and have more sun damage the collagen breaks down and that’s why we get wrinkles. It turns out that the breakdown of this collagen slows the growth of melanoma in the elderly.

We also know that men get more skin cancer than women, and its has usually been thought this is because historically men had more sun exposure working from outside. However, my research has shown that this is actually because women have a stronger immune system. Your immune system stops you from getting sick, but also protects you against cancer development. Women’s immune system are better at protecting them from skin cancer than men’s and now I am trying to find out why that is.

But of course, don’t forget to wear your sunscreen.

A typical day for me is working from 9am to anywhere between 4-7pm. Sometimes its a long day but one advantage of working in research is its a lot easier to work your own hours.  If I don’t have much lab work to do I know I can work from home for a bit, the flexibility is a great part of it.

Each day is different too. Sure I have to repeat experiments sometimes but doing a bunch of different experiments alongside other tasks means there is a lot of variability. One of the reasons I wanted to do research was to avoid a job where every day is the same, and full of repetitive tasks.

A day can be spent in the lab running experiments, or analysing data that I have generated to get my results and solve problems. We read a lot of papers to keep up to date with the latest research, have meetings to discuss our own research and others, and write our own papers.

A work day can be very social too, chatting to lab members and team mates while working, having lunch or coffee/tea when we aren’t too busy. Not every day is rigidly structured, so long as the work is getting done I have a lot of freedom in deciding how to do it.