Profile

I live close to Exeter and have just got two new puppies! One is a Labrador retriever and the other is a Springer Spaniel named Brave and Buttons, respectively. I believe being a scientist is a state of mind, a way of thinking but before I started training as an official clinical scientist, I went to University to Study Biology. During this time, I worked really hard to learn as much as I could and I also had a  job tutoring other students!

In the summers between University I worked at an American summer camp looking after campers aged 7-13 and my main job there was water-skiing instructor! This was always a dream of mine and being able to learn lots mentally throughout term time and then push myself physically during the summers made for a very rewarding few years! I believe life is all about trying to find a balance between learning lots and being active as often as possible to help stay healthy!

So, I work for the National Health Service and even though I am 25, I am still training! It’s kind of like being at school, but rather than learning at school, I learn at work! how great does that sound!? I work as part of a team of technicians and scientists who look at the DNA of people who are in hospital to try and work out what is making them poorly. We can do this because scientists all over the world have worked really hard to figure out what a healthy person’s DNA should look like. This is important because although it is normal for the order of code of everyone’s DNA to be different (this it is one of the reasons everyone looks different to one another) sometimes, changes in people’s DNA can make them poorly and this is what the team and I try to discover. We then let the doctors know what we find out who then tell the patients and offer treatment.

My role in the team requires me to look at lots of large data sets on the computer and use computer coding/computer programming to analyse and look at this data. It’s really interesting and I’m always trying to solve a puzzle!

Because I am training, I have no typical day! Sometimes I’ll write some computer code to analyse some data or automate a task on the computer. Other days I’ll go to patient consultations to see what happens there. Sometimes I go to meetings with other trainees to help organise news ways of training. Sometimes I’ll go to University in Manchester to learn new things. It really is exciting.