Profile

I am interested in finding out what happens to our body when our blood sugar is too high. This disease is called diabetes and affects millions of people worldwide and if we can understand what causes it, we can save lots of lives.

I work with mice where we have altered their genes (mutation) so they are diabetic. These mice live perfectly happy lives, eating, running around their cages and they even occasional try to bite me if they are quick enough! The only symptoms they have is high blood glucose and urinate a lot, just like patients with diabetes. Using these mice, we can perform lots of studies similar to what doctors do in patients. We can even make them better by giving them the same medication as diabetic patients!

I get to the lab at 9am and try to spend 20 minutes answering emails and planning my experiments for the day. At lot of my experiments need to be performed at specific times, some before lunch, some in the afternoon, so it is really important to plan everything properly!

After I have checked my emails, I usually go and play with my mice. I make sure they are happy, healthy and sometimes I have to give them glucose to check if they are diabetic. Then it is back to the lab to have lunch with my lab mates before work starts again! In the afternoon I might have to cycle to a lab at the hospital nearby to perform some other experiments. Here, I get to take lots of pretty pictures of the pancreas where I look what happens to the structure of the cells which secrete insulin and glucagon- two hormones which control the levels of glucose in our blood. By about 6pm it is time to head back to the lab and fill in my lab book which describes everything I have done that day, whether it has work or what problems I have encountered! If I don’t do that, I easily forget! Eventually, I leave to go home at 7pm and its off to bed for it all to start the following day!