Profile

I’m a third year DPhil student in Clinical Medicine. I split my time between working at Oxford University and Imperial College in London. They’re both excellent places to do research, so I’m lucky!

My DPhil project is investigating the immune system in tuberculosis infection. Lots of people in the world are infected with TB bacteria – about 2.5 billion people! But it can be hard for doctors to guess who will get sick and who will stay healthy. Plus whilst TB is pretty contagious, there are lots of us who can avoid catching tuberculosis even after spending plenty of time with someone who is sick with TB. We know that this is partly down to the immune system BUT there’s a lot we don’t know about how the immune system does it.

My own research focuses on an exciting group of white blood cells. These cells make up a really interesting part of the immune system, but one we’re still learning about. We think these cells help protect people against all sorts of bacteria, like those that cause tuberculosis, and there are scientists around the world trying to prove it. When I’ve finished my DPhil, I hope someone will build on the work that I’m doing with other researchers in Oxford and London to invent some new ways of treating people who are sick with TB. For now though, we’re just looking at the immune system a bit like a puzzle, trying to find out what all the pieces are.

No day is the same! But there are some things I do quite regularly. We do research using blood from donors, but we need to get the white blood cells out! This can take an hour or two. First we take blood, and then we spin it really fast for ages to separate the red blood cells from the white blood cells. After that, we use a pipette to pick out the white blood cells. It looks a bit like this!:

A lot of my experiments also involve infecting cells with bacteria – like the really nasty ones that cause tuberculosis. Breathing in tuberculosis bacteria can be deadly without treatment, so we have to be careful. All the experiments we do with tuberculosis bacteria are done in a special Biosafety Level 3 laboratory. This keeps us safe by making sure that there is always some air to push bacteria away from us whilst we work.

Once I’ve left my cells to battle the bugs in a petri dish I normally investigate the outcome by using a few of my favourite techniques! These are microscopy, flow cytometry or simply by counting colonies of bacteria.

Here’s an example of what I see when I look down a microscope! I have picked two proteins inside of a cell to look at – one I’ve coloured red, and one I’ve coloured green.

Sometimes I get a chance to try a new technology in the lab, or to use a different type of bacteria (some made to glow green!). Here’s a plate of Salmonella bacteria, which have been genetically modified to make green fluorescent protein. Normally you would see spots where colonies of bacteria are growing, but this is what happens when you prepare the bacteria on Halloween…

As well as infection experiments, I get lots of tissue samples from the lungs of TB patients to analyse, so I spend some of my mornings at St Mary’s Hospital in London watching the doctor very carefully steer a long tube with a camera attached deep inside someones chest!

On top of the practical work that makes up most of my time as a DPhil student, there are lots of other things to do that are quite important. I will try and read science articles when I can, and go to plenty of interesting talks. There’s also lots of online shopping involved! If we would like to do an interesting experiment, we have to search for the right tools and find the best price!