Profile

I am a PhD student at the University of Bristol and I work with lots of other scientists in my university and around the world. We try to understand how our cells (the Lego blocks of you and me) do what they do! I like to look at neurons (long, branching cells that look like roots from a tree), which most of your brain is made from. Here is an animation showing how neurons talk to each other in the brain (ignore the ‘STEP’ bit).

The shape of a neuron
Neurons connect to each other like a big, tangled mess of spaghetti and this makes it really hard to look at (the spaghetti strands are also 1000x smaller than the spaghetti we eat). We can use a microscope to look at things that are VERY small, millions of times smaller than the width of a single hair! I use a microscope to look at neurons to find out what is happening as they connect to each other while on a glass dish or in a living mouse.

All of the scientists around the world who are working on this (including me!) share results and ideas with each other. This helps to find out what to do next and builds an idea of what we think is happening in our brains.

In my spare time I play and coach dodgeball, play video games and listen/dance to music! I also like to share science with the public and people like you.

Dodgeball, represent.
Feel free to ask me about any of this and more!

The great thing about being a PhD student is that you run on your own time, you don’t HAVE to be in early unless there is something important to do. It’s great! I just work a bit later if I want to stay in bed in the morning.

The many stairs to my office!
Getting to my office means walking up many stairs to the top floor, once I catch my breath I head to the lab to check my neurons are alive and well-fed. They need to be looked after because they are not used to being in a glass dish, it would be like somebody taking me and you and trying to make us live on another planet with no oxygen or food, we’d need special things to help us survive and it would be very difficult to keep us going!

Loads of dishes of neurons in the incubator, being kept happy.
Next come experiments, I might be: putting extra stuff in neurons to mark things I want to look at with glowing tags; freezing neurons in time so I can look at everything while it is still; putting living neurons on the microscope to observe the glowing tags or even looking in to the brains of LIVING mice (using a little glass window) to see what is happening! This has to be the best part of the day, it really is amazing to watch stuff move around in a brain. Here is a video of mitochondria moving around in a neuron that I took last year. Mitochondria are essential for providing energy to our cells, and I love them!

A multiphoton microscope
In any time in between I would meet up with my boss to talk about my plans, check emails, talk to labmates about problems and go around the other labs to see what my friends are up to (always fun and interesting!). Finally, you would find me looking at the pictures and videos I take on the microscope and trying to work out what they mean for our ideas about how the brain works.

On average I might spend 50% of my time in the lab and 50% at my computer, but it can change from day to day.