Profile

I am originally from Burnley which is a small town near Manchester. I moved to Oxford in 2014, initially for a short 3 month job. Stayed a bit longer than expected…

I am completely obsessed with music and spend most of my free time either playing guitar or going to gigs. I have 4 guitars now but I reckon there’s room for one more. Maybe five. I also like gaming (Team Playstation), reading comics, and exploring abandoned places to take photographs. I’m writing a children’s book, it’s about a turtle.

King Julien from the Madagascar films is my hero.

At the moment I’m a postdoctoral fellow which means that I manage my own project and am essentially my own boss. This means I get to do the work I’m most interested in, but there are some downsides, like if anything messes up it’s up to me to handle it!

My project is to try and use the proteins which venomous snakes use to protect themselves from their own venom to develop new antivenoms. I want to try and make more effective antivenoms which are cheaper to produce, and require no live animals.

Most of my work has involved sequencing genomes and looking at what genes are expressed in a particular organ or tissue, which involves both work in a lab and work on a computer. This type of method is applicable to a lot of different situations, so I’ve been lucky to work on a lot of different animals including snakes, geckos, sharks, frogs and gerbils.

AWESOME 😀

Handle some snakes and take some samples (probably via saying hello to the geckos), do some experiments in the lab, chat with other scientists about ideas, set some jobs running on the computer server (basically a really powerful computer), everything goes smoothly – Success!

NOT-SO-AWESOME 😐

Read and reply to LOTS of emails, check on the computer server, spend hours figuring out why all the computer jobs have crashed, spend the afternoon writing grant applications and editing paper manuscripts.