Profile

I’m a developmental geneticist in the Systems Biology department. Don’t worry, none of us can really say what ‘systems biology’ actually means anyway! What I do is take groups of people with similar diseases and disorders that seem to occur from when they were developing as an embryo or foetus and sequence their DNA. I only look at the specific bits of DNA that aren’t gene regions – the ‘gaps’. It used to be called ‘junk DNA’ but now we know that there’s some important stuff in there too. If I find interesting differences in these groups of people’s DNA then I can try and see if that’s related to their disease or disorder.

My typical day will change depending on the time of year. It’s not that I’m a seasonal worker but sometimes experiments seem to come in bulk! Right now, I get into work nice and early and have about 7 hours of lab bench work to do to prepare a lot of human DNA to be sequenced. If I manage to squeeze in multiple tea breaks then that’s a bonus!