Profile

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College. I study what causes different heart diseases and try to develop new ways of treating them. We do this in many different ways such as: investigating how heart muscle works using isolated pieces of the heart and using human genetics (identifying mutations in patients with heart disease) to identify important proteins in the heart and investigating what happens if these proteins are missing or damaged.

One of the things I love about being a scientist is the flexibility. I am free to come in when I like and leave when I like, as long as I get all my work done. The hours that I work are dependent on the experiments that I am doing at the time, for example, some experiments take a long time to complete and so I may have to work late into the evening one day but then I reward myself with a shorter day the next day.

On a typical day I would arrive at work at 9.30-10 and have a coffee whilst checking and replying to emails. I would then start my experiments for that day. In between experiments I spend time reading journal papers, analyzing and writing up my results, drinking more coffee and coming up with ideas for future experiments.