Profile

I come from a small village in the Rhymney valley. In school, I learned how to play the clarinet and later the tenor saxophone. When I got older, I learned how to play bass guitar and acoustic guitar and played in a band for a short while. I finished comprehensive school with good grades in the sciences. So I went straight into college to learn Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Psychology. But I hated Physics! So I swapped Physics for Electronics which was a bit more interesting.

I took a gap year after college. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I liked working in the lab, so I decided to do a lab-style degree. I moved to Cardiff to a degree in Biomedical Science. I enjoyed living in Cardiff so much, that after I finished university, I decided to stay.

With a bit more time and money, I was able to learn how to climb. I made good friends at the climbing centre and I still meet up with them every week.

When I started climbing, I was capable of some easy routes (5, 5+ or V2) but I’m proud to have improved a lot. I’m now climbing hard routes (6b, 6b+ or V6) which makes climbing much more challenging!

I work in a genetics lab. In this lab, our goal is to understand why someone is sick. It could be that this person has been seen by their doctor. This person might have already had tests that didn’t tell them very much about why they are sick.

We will take a sample of blood and perform some lab techniques (experiments) and we will eventually put this sample into an analyser (a machine that can read something in the sample). This analyser will give us data, and with this data, we can make a diagnosis. A diagnosis is another way of saying that you can prove that someone has a specific disease. A good example of an analyser is a DNA sequencer, which can read your DNA like a book.

Most of the diseases we test for can be divided into two categories:

• Hereditary Diseases
• Cancer

If you have a ‘Hereditary’ disease, then your mum or dad might also have the disease. Just like you might inherit blue eyes from mum or brown hair from dad. You can inherit a disease the same way. A classic example is something called mitochondrial deafness. People with this disease cannot hear from birth. Mothers with this disease will always pass this disease to their children. But it is unfair for us to call mitochondrial deafness a disease. The deaf community is a rich and communal culture. Most people who have mitochondrial deafness it see it as a part of their identity.

You will likely have heard of cancer before. What most people don’t realise, is that cancer is a genetic disease. Normal cells turn into cancer because of changes in their DNA. Testing the DNA of cancer cells can tell us loads about what sort of cancer it is. We can learn about how it behaves (if it is fast growing or slow growing). But more importantly, we can learn about what drugs would be best to fight it.

A lot of my job involves looking at data. The scientists that work for me handle the samples and run the experiments. My job is to make sure that we can always be sure what sample is being tested and when. You’d be surprised how easy it is to mix up samples! If I didn’t keep the experiments in check. We could be telling Mr Palmer that he is absolutely fine and Mrs Jenkins that she has lung cancer. When the truth is the opposite! Mr Palmer would go home without treatment and his cancer would get worse, and Mrs Jenkins would undergo chemotherapy without ever needing it. That’s why it’s so important to keep things in check.

Another important part of my job is to get to know new technologies. There are always faster or better ways to do things, especially in genetics! We’ll sometimes want to try a new technology in our lab. In that case, I am usually the first person to learn about it and try it out. I can then train my scientists on how to use it.