Profile

I work on a disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), which is a disease that makes the nerves in people’s bodies get sick and die. Unfortunately, the worst version of it is also the most common, and it affects young children, and a lot of them die before they can celebrate their 2nd birthday.

Some really smart scientists have found out that it’s not just your nerves that get sick when you have SMA, but also lots of other parts of the body, like your heart, spleen and blood vessels. That’s where I come in – I’m trying to work out what is wrong with the blood vessels and how we can fix them. I also look at the spleen, because that’s one of the organs in the body that helps you get better when you have a cold, so we need to find out how to fix the problems there.

I look at blood vessels by dissecting part of the eye and colouring in the blood vessels so that I can see them better – that’s when I get to use the fluorescent microscope – it’s super cool!

I do immunohistochemistry – which is just a fancy word for saying I get some tissue (like a piece of the eye) and use something like food colouring to stain different cells so that I can see them better.

Here’s a really pretty picture of blood vessels in the eye

There’s a lot of waiting around in between each step of the experiment, so I take the chance to go and have a cup of coffee and read some new science papers. I sometimes go over to the anatomy department and help the students to learn their anatomy, which is pretty good fun!