Profile

My lab is interested in understanding the proteins that live in the membrane that surrounds each cell in your body. These proteins are important as they control what goes into and out of your cells. This communication is not surprisingly pretty important for the cell, and intact most medicines work by altering they way these proteins work.

My lab uses a type of laser microscopy that is able to see individual protein molecules by attaching a ‘tag’ to these proteins that emits light. This produces images that look just like stars in the night’s sky, just my stars wiggle around in the membrane.

You can see single molecule in cells, but cells are really complicated and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on a lot of the time. My lab’s solution is to put together cell membranes from scratch, building a artificial copy of the structure of the real cell but from purified components. That way, it’s easy for us to just change one thing and see exactly what happens. By simplifying things in this way we can begin to pull apart what’s going on and figure out how your cell membrane works.

Running a research group involves reading lots about what other scientists are doing, to try and figure out what’s possible and interesting to others. I’m also writing to the government to ask for money to carry on what we’re doing.

I also teach chemistry at my university, so that involves giving lectures and teaching small groups of students.

I have around 12 people that work with me to get the science done. I spend a lot of my time meeting with them, trying to figure out what to do next, working out what’s gone wrong and generally encouraging them! Sometimes the apparatus in the lab needs to be fixed, or new experiments built and I really enjoy playing with the lasers, and mechanical components and microscopes to get them working again. For example, one of our latest toys is a 3D printer, and we’ve been playing about trying to print optical components to make our experiments work using it.