Profile

I like to spend my spare time climbing and going for walks to take photos. I love music and listen to a lot of different music. I like crafting and making things, one year I knitted hats for everyone in my family! I also love animals and being around them. I like comedy and laugh very easily.

I use environmental DNA to work out what species of bacteria are living in the mud below salmon farms. These bacteria then tell me how healthy the mud is, and if the salmon farm is damaging it too much. This is because the salmon poo all over the sea floor beneath the farms, and it builds up and gets very smelly and upsets the little bugs that live on the seabed. The DNA is very good at telling us how smelly it is! I also look at how the mud is stored before I get the DNA out of it, and if that has any effect on my results. I found that if I left the mud in a car on a hot day then the DNA will be different!

If I’m at home then I’ll start my day with admin work to wake up a bit. There’s always lots of emails! Then I’ll start looking at some data. Plotting my data makes it easy for me to see what is going on. I like to make sure they’re all as clear as possible and look nice. I’ll also do some reading, there’s always new science about the work I do and I want to know about it! I have a lot of writing to do too. I like to break everything up so I don’t get bored of doing one thing.

When I’m in the lab I am getting DNA out of mud and preparing it for sequencing. There are a lot of steps that take a long time. I’ll start my day by planning what I want to do that day, and then defrosting everything I need. Once I have the DNA out of the mud, I make lots of copies of it with PCR to make sure I have lots of the DNA I need. I then add some tags to the DNA so I can mix it all together and put it on a sequencer. The sequencer is my favourite part! It takes a few days but I can watch its progress online. It’s so exciting finding out what species were in the mud from their DNA.