Profile

I grew up in the countryside on my family farm and love going back to help out whenever I can. Some of my favourite memories are of feeding baby lambs in the spring.

Living in Scotland I am lucky enough to be surrounded by beautiful countryside, I love nothing more than packing up the car and within a short time you can be in the hills or at the coast!

Pulmonary hypertension is a life-limiting condition with no cure. There are some drugs available but they only slow the progression of the disease and those who have it unfortunately die due to heart failure. My research aims to investigate new molecular pathways to find new targets for drugs.

To investigate the disease I study a mixture of in vitro (outside the living thing for example cells grown in a culture dish) and in vivo (in a living animal) models.

First thing I do usually is check any mice which we are studying, this involves weighing them and changing their bedding and feeding them. I also check them to see if they are healthy and observe them to see that they are happy and not ill or stressed.

If I have cells I warm up the reagents to 37 degrees (as cells don’t like being too hot or too cold!) and then add them to my cells. I do lots of experiments using special cells which usually grow in the blood vessels.

I look at a lot of the molecular pathways involved in the disease so to do this I need to investigate proteins and genes. This can mean I have a lot of data to analyse too.

A big part of being a researcher is sharing our research in scientific journals, this means getting all our results into understandable graphs and writing reports. I often do this work at home as I get distracted too easily at work!