Meet the scientists!

My work focuses on finding out how medically important fungi cause infection and disease. Fungi can cause irritating infections like Athlete’s foot or thrush, but in some patients also cause life-threatening disease .

In my work, we investigate various properties of fungi to see if they are involved in the ability of the fungus to cause disease. This involves knocking out genes and analysing differences in behaviour. In addition, we are also able to look at how the host behaves during development of disease. We can analyse both the host immune response or we can analyse changes in host gene expression during development of disease. This has become easier with sequencing of host genomes, as we can now analyse gene expression across the whole genome by DNA microarray analysis – very cool!!!!!

I especially enjoy my work because you get to travel the world to attend conferences and speak about your work! In the last two years, I have attended conferences in Tokyo (Japan) and Miami (USA), as well as various conferences in the UK .

This is one of the things that I love about my job… there is no such thing as a typical day. Some days I will be in the lab all day (bliss!) and other days I may be stuck in front of a computer writing scientific papers, dealing with administration, writing grant applications or even analysing data. Other days I’ll also be teaching undergraduate or postgraduate students – this can be small group teaching, lectures or practical classes. The days when I can teach and work in the lab are some of my favourite days.

I carry out a workshop with nursery age kids to demonstrate the importance of hand washing and to show how germs are spread. We use a special UV-powder and cream that shows up under UV or black-light (very CSI!). The kids smear the cream on their hands, or pass around an object covered in the powder, and then can detect the presence of the microbes with the special light. The young kids really love it (me too!). I’d really like to buy more kit, as children aged 3-5 all want to be in control of the light.
I have also bought some of the cuddly giant microbes (http://www.giantmicrobes.com/uk) to illustrate what microbes look like, and there’s a few more that would definitely add to my collection. The children look at the bugs that I’ve got, and then draw their own versions of what they think bacteria look like. This is really good fun!!