Profile

I’m a carbohydrate chemist which means I work with sugars though it’s very important not to eat them!

Sugars are vital to our bodies, not just as food but as information carriers. Sugars on our cells tell other cells important things. For example, which blood group you are depends on which sugars your blood cells have on their surface.

Tuberculosis cells have sugars on them like all cells and these tell our bodies different things. I work on some of these sugars, trying to find out what they are saying.

There are lots of different sugars on cells, all saying different things: for example they can say what kind of cell it is, a neuron or a muscle cell, they can say what stage of its life cycle a cell is in, if it’s just taking it easy or growing. This information is important for every process in our bodies.

The sugars I look at seem to be telling our immune system that everything is fine and there’s no need to get excited. When you have an infection, you don’t want this, you want your immune system to fight the bacteria. I make these sugars and find out exactly what they are saying by working with biologist and cells. If we know what they are saying we can use this to our advantage in medicine when fighting TB.

I do lots of different things, I might spend a day at the computer analysing data or I might spend a day growing and feeding cells, mixing it up keeps it really interesting. I’m usually to be found in our chemistry lab making sugars so a typical day is spend doing reactions and purifying products. Sometimes I spend the day trying to identify what I have made using various machines. Every now and then I’ll spend the day reading books and publications in the office or writing reports or analysing data. I feel lucky that I get to do lots of different things and no day is the same as the last!

It’s very important to have a clean and neat working environment to prevent accidents happening. I always try to keep my work area neat (though I have to admit that I don’t always succeed!). Chemistry is really dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing and are not careful. If you are careful it’s perfectly safe. We always wear lab coats, goggles and gloves in the lab. We also use something called  a fumehood which is basically a cupboard with a massive extractor fan attached, this prevents you breathing in anything harmful or smelly.

The people I work with are really nice and we’re good friend. We have lots fun together and help each other out a lot. This makes work a lot more enjoyable. We often ask each other’s advice and try to tackle problems together.

At the end of the day I might meet some friends for tea, go home and have dinner then relax on the couch with my pet cat, Lyra!