Profile

I am really interested in how proteins and enzymes in cells work and my research is focused on looking at how bacteria survive and are able to adapt themselves to different environments and food sources. By understanding how bacteria that cause disease survive in humans and animals, we can figure out how to make better antibiotics.

Bacteria are also a source of new antibiotics against other bacteria as they are always in competition with each other in their environments, so one part of my research is looking how we can get harmless bacteria to make new antibiotics and drugs for us by using the machinery they have inside their cells.

I work in a field called structural biology, where we look at the detailed shape of proteins using techniques like X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. These allow us to make models of how proteins look and how they interact with each other and drugs to see how they work. Once we know their structure, other scientists can design better drugs and antibiotics.

I live in Newcastle, which is quite a trek to my work in Edinburgh, so I do a lot of reading on the train and prepare my self for the day in the lab. When I get into work I turn my computer on and grab a coffee while I check my emails to see what’s happening with the latest scientific journals and if I have any meetings coming up. At the moment I have an undergraduate student in the lab doing his final year project, he is with me full time until May and it is a great opportunity for the students to get proper experience of working in a lab on a real project. We chat for a while about the experiments he will be doing today and then head into the lab.

We do a lot of different types of experiment, so no two days are the exactly the same, but at the moment we are trying to extract some proteins from bacteria to see how the proteins work as enzymes.

Lunch happens whenever we have an experiment on that we can leave for ten or more minutes, sometimes I get a leisurely break where I can do some reading, or writing, but mostly I have to quickly eat something to get back into the lab for an experiment finishing.

The afternoon usually has more experiments and there’s no set finishing time, although the undergraduates aren’t allowed to work past 5pm.

Other days I’ll have meetings with other students, people I work with, or I’ll be teaching undergraduates, so I won’t get quite so much time in the lab. There’s always a lot of writing that needs to be done, whether it is scientific papers, reports, applications for funding for students, or other staff, health and safety forms. Usually I do what writing I can on the train home as it is quiet and there is no one distracting me.

When I get home I’ll usually chat to my wife about science while we are getting our daughter ready for bed and having our dinner. She’s a scientist too, so it’s not entirely boring for her, but I think she might think I talk about science too much.