Profile

I live in Gateshead (the other side of the river from Newcastle!) in 2-bed flat near the Tyne Bridge. I’m the eldest of 5 girls (!) and am the only member of my family in science! I have always loved human genetics – it was one of the areas of biology I just naturally understood. I had to work a bit harder on ecology and plants!

I’m a member of a local running club, the Saltwell Harriers, and particularly love running half marathons and 10k races. I was on Blue Peter when I was 10, I sing loudly when I’m cooking and I used to compete for GBR in fencing.

I’ve worked in industry doing drug testing, for the NHS testing patient samples for cancer mutations and now in an academic lab doing scientific research so I have almost worked in many different science jobs! I also volunteer at the MakerFaire UK every year (science and engineering festival – really cool!) in Newcastle – I’ve spoken about space, taught people how to solder and made giant bubbles.

I work at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research based at Newcastle University. We are unique in that we work very closely with the NHS Diagnostics group and are able to use patient samples (with permission). We try and work out why the patients are sick and in doing so, we can work out what the different proteins in the mitochondria do with the hope of discovering new treatments and therapies for these patients.

Our group was recently in the news because we had developed a new technique based on IVF that allowed women with unhealthy mitochondria to have healthy babies by using a donor. The law was changed so that we could start using this new technique.

I’d get into work and check to see that my cells are healthy and not hungry (we have special media that will change from red to orange/yellow if they have used up the energy source in the media, glucose). I will either harvest the cells to be experimented with, or give them fresh media (with more glucose!) to keep them happy.

If I am doing an experiment on the cells, I will need to break them open to get to the mitochondria inside. We use detergents and other chemicals to break the cells open, and sometimes we have to grind them. Once opened, I can perform further experiments to see how much of certain proteins, RNA or DNA are in my samples.

Depending on what has changed in the cells, we can start to work out what these certain proteins do in the mitochondria. The more we know about the mitochondria, the better we can treat the patients!