Profile

I live in Edinburgh in a flat where I can see the castle from my lounge. I love animals, and have a whippet puppy named Enzo. I was born in the USA and I’ve lived in a bunch of different places since then! I drink a crazy amount of tea every day. My favourite TV show is RuPaul’s Drag Race. I’m a black belt in taekwondo (but I haven’t trained in a little while). My best friends are drag queens and I go watch them perform a lot! I run an LGBT book club for my university in my spare time.

Me and my supervisor doing a huge amount of cell culture for a big CRISPR experiment. We plated 64 large flasks that day!

The main aim of my research is to see if we can find new drugs to treat ovarian cancer, especially for patients where the current treatments don’t work any more. We want to make these drugs “targeted”, meaning they only kill the cancer cells and leave the normal cells alone. This would help to stop some of the nasty side effects that cancer patients can get, like their hair falling out. I’m looking at a particular target that we could use drugs against. It’s called ALDH, and is an enzyme cancer cells hijack to stop them being damaged so they can grow more.

My lab did some work a few years ago on targeting the same ALDH enzyme in skin cancer (melanoma), and found an old antibiotic that’s only really used in Africa, called NAZ, that can kill the cancer cells that hijacked ALDH! They did a lot of research to see how this works, and proved that in the lab it was a success! They’re now hoping to start clinical trials of NAZ in skin cancer patients, to see if it kills their cancer too.

An example of my cell culture plates treated with the drug I’m studying, NAZ

In the meantime, they wanted to know if NAZ can kill cancer cells in other types of cancer – that’s where I come in! I’m trying to see if NAZ can kill ovarian cancer cells that have too much ALDH, in the same way it kills skin cancer. I use lots of different experiments to test this, like treating cells in petri dishes with NAZ, or treating mice that have ovarian cancer!

In what I do, there’s really no such thing as a typical day! It varies so much based on what experiments you’re doing, what equipment you need, and whether you have any presentations to prepare for…

I usually try and be at the lab at 9am (but I’m bad at mornings so this doesn’t always happen!). We try to have meetings in the morning, so that they’re easy to schedule around people’s experiments. I’ll meet with my boss to talk about my work, or with my whole lab to hear about what they’re working on. This usually involves lots of tea and biscuits!

I like to try and do my “office work” in the morning. This is usually a mix of planning my experiments, reading new scientific papers to keep up-to-date with other people’s work, or analysing the data for my own experiments to see what the results mean.

We all have lunch together as a lab at 12pm. This is a very important part of the day! We often try and schedule our experiments around this (although it’s not always possible – science has to be flexible!). It’s a great time to catch up with your friends in the lab who may be working in different parts of the building, as well as chatting more informally about your work.

On most days after lunch, different scientists at my research institute will give a talk about their work. These are great, because you get to hear about brand new science that you might otherwise miss, because it’s not directly related to you. Some of the most memorable talks include one about the diseases dinosaurs got, and one about reading the DNA of whales! The talks are held in the coolest room at the top of the building, which has a view of the whole of Edinburgh!

The view from the top floor terrace at work

After the talks I usually work on my own experiments. This can be SO variable! I do about 1/3 of my work with animals, so I sometimes go to the “mouse house” where the mice live! This is its own special room, where you need to change clothes and sometimes even shower before going in to keep it sterile and avoid giving the mice infections.

Other days I’ll do work in the main lab, using samples from human patients, or cancer cells grown in a petri dish. I do all sorts of experiments with these, which mostly involve looking at the ALDH in the cancer cells, or treating them with NAZ to see what happens. I’ve added pictures of the main lab, and the sterile cabinet where I work with cells to avoid them getting infected!

My bench in the lab

The tissue culture hood where I do my cell culture work

I try to finish my work at around 5pm, but this varies a LOT depending on what I have to do that day. Some days I don’t have much to run, and can go home really early! Other days, it’s been known to see people having their dinner in the office before getting back to work… It’s always worth it when you get exciting new results from a big experiment though!