Profile

I live in Cambridge in a flat filled with plants and my pet leopard gecko. I’m getting pretty good at baking after a lot of practice in lockdown (when I wasn’t helping in the testing labs!). My favourite sports are fencing and kendo (because I get to feel like a pirate/samurai). I love video games and board games. My pronouns are he/him.

I work at the beautiful Babraham Institute in Cambridge, where we have lots of rabbits, squirrels and a friendly cat to keep us company.

Babraham Institute – Babraham Hall

I work in a big team of scientists who work together to understand how DNA works like an instruction manual, telling cells what to make and how to do their specific jobs.

Wolf Reik Lab Group

We are mostly interested as to what happens at the very first stages of embryo development, and I work on how the human brain is built.

A lot of my research looks at stem cells, cells which have yet to decide what job they will do in the body. We grow these cells and they are a little like having a pet, they need feeding regularly, you need to clean up their waste, and you also need to make sure they have enough room to grow.

These cells like the conditions that are found within the human body, so we grow them in incubators which keep them at similar temperature that our bodies are at, 37 degrees Celsius.

Cell Incubator

When we need to take a break we can stop the cells from growing and store them for later by freezing them and keeping them in liquid nitrogen, which keeps the cells incredibly cold, -180 degrees Celsius!

Freezing cells in liquid nitrogen

While growing these human stem cells I then use lots of cool pieces of technology, such as CRISPR, to manipulate and change their DNA (the instruction manual within cells) and see how they react, to try and understand how cells decide to become brain cells.

Gel tanks for measuring DNA length

Cell sorter for selecting cells based on colour and size

Fibroblast cells under a microscope

Life of a scientist can be rather exciting, normally we get to travel around the world to talk to other scientists about our research. Like in 2018, my lab traveled to Athens in Greece.

Reik lab group in Athens

Last year I volunteered to help set up one of the screening labs that tested people for COVID-19. I got to work alongside scientists from all over the UK and the army to help set up one of the largest testing labs in the UK and we were able to use our skills and experience to make a real difference. I also made a lot of friends in the process, learnt how to use some cool robots, and met the prime minister.

COVID-19 screening lab, reaching 1 million samples tested

After my morning coffee while feeding the Babraham squirrels I head inside the lab to begin my day. I put on my clean labcoat and enter our special cell growing room to check on the stem cells I am growing. Here I use a special hood which keeps out bacteria and fungi which could harm my cells as they like to eat the same nutrients I use to grow them. It does this by making a curtain of air which I can put my arms through after cleaning my hands with alcohol, but doesn’t let any microbes from outside the hood in.  I then use a special vacuum to suck up all the old waste from my cells and carefully replace it with fresh nutrients. If my cells are filling up the plates too much I will need to transfer a small number of these cells onto a fresh empty plate to give them plenty of room to keep growing.

Growing cells within a safety hood

When all the cells are fed and put back in the incubator I head back to normal lab bench, it may look a little messy, but it’s because there are lots of different chemicals and reagents we need to use depending on what experiments we need to do that day. Some days I will be growing bacteria, other days I will be breaking cells open to collect DNA. This part of the day can be very challenging as I have to know how to do lots of different things, but many of the experiments I perform have instructions which I can follow, kind of like following a recipe. This however is also sometimes the coolest part of the day, because I get to use futuristic equipment and often get to try do some experiments that no-one has ever tried before.

Molecular biology lab bench

After all my experiments for the day are done, I make sure to write all of it down into my lab notebook so I can remember what I’ve tried and what I found out that day. I then make sure I tidy up my bench so it’s not messy when I need to use it tomorrow.

At the end of the day I typically will have a meeting with other scientists in my lab group so we can discuss what we have learnt so far, and come up with ideas for experiments we can try in the future.