Profile

Hi there welcome to my profile! I’m really excited to be a scientist on I’m a Scientist Get me Out of Here 2018 and I’m looking forward to hearing from everyone and answering any questions you have.

My name is Fiana and I’m 24. I have lived in Dublin (Artane) my whole life and still live here now. I love to travel, swim and bring my puppy for walks. Here are some photos of him. His name is Franklin and he’s a 1 year old pug!

I am a PhD student in Trinity College Dublin. This means that I will be spending the next 4 years researching questions that I find really interesting. As I am a scientist in the Genes Zone, you may have guessed already that I study genetics.

Genetics is a branch of biology that looks at our DNA. You have probably heard of DNA when people are talking about Crime Scene Investigations or Evolution. If you saw Jurassic World you will have heard the scientists mention DNA when they are designing their super-dinosaurs!

Unfortunately we don’t have any dinosaurs in our lab! Instead we study families. We look at how DNA gets passed down to children from their parents. And I promise it’s just as exciting as dinosaurs!

In our lab we focus on looking at how changes in our DNA affect the way our brains develop and how this can give differences in our behaviors. This is the study of Neurodevelopmental Genetics — I know this sounds very complicated but if you break it down “Neuro” refers to the brain, “Developmental” means how it is formed and “Genetics” is how our DNA affects this.

Check out My Typical Day (long answer) to find out exactly how we do this research!

As a scientist, everyday is different and this means that you will never ever get bored!

Research

We study DNA in our research group. To get a DNA sample we will take blood or saliva samples from a family. In the lab we can separate the DNA from the cells in the blood.

Here is a photo of me working in the lab taking DNA from saliva samples:

When our DNA samples are ready to go we load them onto an amazing machine called a DNA sequencer. This machine reads every single molecule of DNA in the sample. That’s around 3 billion molecules!!!

This is the DNA sequencer here in Trinity College Dublin (TrinSeq). It is run by an amazing team of scientists and takes a lot of care and accuracy.

This machine gives us a giant file of all of the genetic information in the DNA sample. To look at this file we need high-performance computers. To search for the interesting genetic information, we use ‘coding’ or ‘programming’. This specific type of coding is called bioinformatics.

So, we search through all of the DNA and find differences between each sample and their parents. We look for differences between samples of people with neurodevelopmental disorders and compare them to DNA samples of people without neurodevelopmental disorders.

Communicating Research

Being a scientist isn’t all about staying in a lab all day doing experiments. We spend a lot of time communicating with other scientists. If we all share our discoveries with one another we can work together to solve scientific mysteries a lot quicker.

Every week we communicate with other scientists. We have lab meetings where we share our progress with each other. Here is a photo of the some of the members of the lab group I am a part of.

As well as communicating with scientists in our team, we share our findings and ideas with scientists all over the world. This happens at conferences. Everyone working in the same branch of research comes together to discuss their work. Here is a photo of me presenting some of our research just last week at the World Congress for Psychiatric Genetics in Glasgow.