Profile – Europium Zone

Education:

Royal Grammar School, Guildford (’03-’08). University of Bath (’08-’12). Queen Mary, University of London (’13-present)
Qualifications:

MBiochem (Hons) in Biochemistry
Work History:

I used to work in a doctors surgery – lots of ill people! I also ran the Students’ Union at the University of Bath.
Current Job:

PhD student in Cancer Research

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Cancer starts when cells start to grow uncontrollably. Your body has loads of ways of trying to stop that happening, but sometimes those systems fail and cancer starts.

A lot of cancers make too much of a piece of machinery in your cells that controls your cells dividing (the process they go through to make more cancer cells). In a normal cell having too much of that machinery would kill it, but cancer cells are able to survive. By understanding how they survive, and finding ways to stop that happening would hopefully mean we could kill the cancer cells that have too much of this machinery.

To understand that I make cells with that extra machinery (called centrosomes) in the lab to see how they act. I use a big microscope to look at the cells dividing.

As an example of what I look at under the microscope –

To have a look at a video I took of cells dividing click here.
My Typical Day:

Is very varied, from growing cells, to sitting in front of a microscope
What I'd do with the prize money:

Put it towards a fun project we run here where students can come here for a week and see what it’s like to do research.

Alex Pool