Profile

I’ve recently started a new job researching how ‘superbugs’ – antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA – spread outside hospitals. In particular, we are going to look at how this is affected by things like how rich or poor people are. The first thing we have to do is read EVERYTHING that every scientist has ever written about this, and write a summary in a few thousand words. I love this bit of working in science, learning new things all the time.

I am mostly working on this project because I know useful bits of maths and how to do research on a whole population at once. I hadn’t worked in Microbiology before, so I am also having to learn lots of new things about bacteria and go back to my A level notes, and I am also learning lots from the people I work with all across the hospital. A few months ago I even went to Spain for a week to learn all about a new sort of statistics to keep track of the way bacteria spread – the person who had invented it mostly speaks Spanish and I don’t speak any at all, so it was hard work but good fun.

I also work on a few other projects. Some of these are about research on mental illness, because I have a mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, which is a mixture of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I also have dyspraxia, which can make me clumsy and forgetful. So when I wasn’t able to work for several years, I volunteered for lots of medical research, got more and more interested, and now I work on several projects which aim to get patients involved in research about their own condition, from telling the scientists what is important to find out about, to having patients design the studies, collect the data and analyse the results.

The biggest project on mental illness I’m involved in at the moment is talking to women with ‘severe mental illness’ to understand how they make decisions about taking or not taking medication during pregnancy. This is a really difficult choice, because there isn’t a clear ‘right’ answer, different doctors and scientists have different opinions on whether it is safer for the mum to come off medicines and risk getting ill, or to stay on medicines and risk the medicines affecting the baby. It depends a lot on what the mum thinks is important to her, and I’d like doctors to get better at listening to that.

Before that I was doing my Masters degree in Public Health. Public Health is about how to stop people getting ill in the first place, so everything from how to stop diseases spreading to how to design transport so people can walk or cycle more and get fitter. I found this fascinating, because it covers everything from very tiny bits of biology like how Ebola virus is passed on, to huge political questions about how to organise society so everybody can be well and happy. I did my big project on how parents make decisions about giving their children the MMR vaccine.

Before that I was mostly not well enough to work for a few years, I did a few odd jobs.

I don’t really have a typical day at work. Today I have mostly been sat in a cafe reading what other scientists have written about how ‘superbugs’ spread. But on other days I might be travelling across the country to talk to a Mum with a small baby about how she decided what medicines to take while she was pregnant, or I might be trying to read a doctor’s messy handwriting in hospital notes from ten years ago to find out what antibiotics they were using. I might even be in Spain trying to remember enough Spanish to order a vegetarian omelette from the hospital canteen for lunch before spending the afternoon learning about new ways of using maths to track the spread of superbugs.