Profile

I live in Leeds with my husband, we have just bought a house and are painting it lots of bright colours to remind us of living in South Africa.  We met in South Africa when we were both working as zoologists, although we miss living in the sunshine it is nice to live in a proper house now instead of a tin shed!

When I am not being a scientist I like to go running in Leeds and the country side around us, I am training for a marathon next year and so far, my longest run has been 3 hours! I need a lot of good music to keep me going!  I also do a lot of walking with my Husband; we like climbing mountains in the UK and abroad.  Last year we went to Chile in South America and climbed an active volcano with smoke coming out of the top – it was a bit scary!

I really like cooking but I am a vegan which means I don’t eat any animal products at all (not even cheese!).  Being vegan can be a bit tricky but it’s also exciting as you can invent loads of new recipes that don’t use animal products like butter and eggs but still taste delicious!

I am also a Girl Guide leader, we meet on Thursday nights and do loads of different activities such as cooking, sports, crafting and looking after our local park and nature reserve.  The best bit about being a guide leader is getting to dress up on themed nights, we recently had a Disney disco and I dressed as Pocahontas.

I work at the University of Leeds in a team of 8 other researchers.  Our team travels across the world to help people understand how to take their medicines properly and to make sure they keep their homes clean and safe.  Both of these are really important to stop microbes (bugs) spreading, and from becoming what we call resistant.  When bugs become resistant, they stop responding to the medicines we use to treat them with, this means really simple illnesses could become very dangerous.   

My team are mainly artists and film-makers, we use art to help people understand how medicines work and how dangerous different microbes and bugs can be.  For example, one of our communities in Nepal (near India) has recently made a series of films about how to safely use antibiotic medicines and are now sharing these films in schools and temples to help other people learn about safe antibiotic use.  This is a really fun way to learn!  But I have to be careful, I am one of the only scientists in my team so I need to check that the information we give to people is correct and that their films and artwork also share correct information.

Before I did this job, I worked as a zoologist (animal scientist) and was very interested in parasitic worms.  These are tiny worms that live inside the digestive system of most animals and can cause health problems.  I worked with Banded mongooses in Uganda (Africa) to understand what parasites they have and how these parasites can affect the way the live and behave.  I found that some parasites can change the way a mongoose smells and this may warn off other mongooses from getting too close and risking catching the parasite.  We also found that mongooses with lots of parasites don’t have many offspring (babies), possible because they are not very healthy.

When I am in Leeds, I work in quite a big office with up to 8 other people. We will have a chat first thing in the morning about what we are all doing so that we can help each other through the day. I will check my emails and read up on useful news about microbes and health. Most of my days involve me keeping our website and twitter up to date and connecting with other scientists who do a similar job to me. We need to share all our learnings so that we can really help people to stay healthy. I might also write up the results of my work in Nepal, these will eventually be published in journals which are like newspapers for science. Other scientists read the journals to find out what we have been doing and to help them plan their next projects.