Profile

I’m from the midlands but am currently living in Edinburgh in my final year of a PhD degree.

I am always looking for a new challenge and recently tried skiing for the first time, without too much falling over.

I travel at every opportunity and am always looking for a new adventure from Peru to the Highlands. I spend a good part of my undergraduate organising an event hitch-hiking across Europe for charity with the Sheffield University RAG society.

I am looking at how kidney cells respond to different environments, to help lay the foundation for kidney tissue engineering.

In tissue engineering ‘scaffolds’ are used to grow cells on. I use fibrous scaffolds made using electrospinning, this is where a high voltage is applied to a polymer solution which is then accelerated towards a ground source. I look at how the diameter of these fibres and how they are arranged effects how the cells grow.

I am also designing a 3D printed bioreactor which will be used to grow cells. The idea is to design a device that better represent how cells are grown within the body.

My project will hopefully lead to a better understanding of which environments kidney cells prefer.

I write myself a to do list at the end of every day so every day is different. This could involve running some simulations for my bioreactor on the computer or making some scaffold to grow cells on.

Some days i spend an entire day in the lab, setting up an experiment or analysing some samples, other days i am researching new ideas in the office, or writing sections for a new paper i am trying to publish.