What inspired you to undertake a PhD?

When I got to university as an undergraduate student, I really enjoyed it. I finally felt like I found something that I really wanted to do, and I just decided that I wanted to do a PhD. And I quite liked the idea of being a lecturer.

What drew you to EnvEast?

I did my undergraduate in environmental science, and I wanted to transition to biology. I was very clear that I wanted to do molecular biology because, in essence, I’d seen a talk about it. It was the fact that EnvEast were willing to chance a scholarship on me, even though I didn’t actually have the background at that stage. I thought the supervisor was the best. I thought the project was the best. It was a very happy outcome where the one you wanted was the one you got.

What did your PhD focus on?

It was in molecular ecology. Tons of jellyfish were turning up around the UK; the numbers seemed to be rising. No one was entirely sure why or what this meant, or indeed, if they fit into the ecosystem – because there was this idea was that nothing eats them, and you can have an ecosystem transition from predominantly fish to predominantly jellies. So, I wanted to test that theory. Normally if you want to work out what fish are eating, you slice them open, and you’d look in their stomachs. But of course, it’s pretty hard to do that with jellyfish because there’s no identifying parts. So, I was developing molecular probes to detect if jellies were in there or not. To cut three years of research short, yep, it turns out fish do eat them. I also did some matching analysis and reviews on sequencing techniques. To be honest, the jellies are a lot more broadly interesting, I think.

How has your background and identity influenced your approach to research and your scientific journey?

Since graduating, I’ve developed long COVID. I’ve had to re-evalute some things. It absolutely affects my ability to do academia and operate in that space. Things like doing lab work would just be too physical, like doing stuff with my arms is really, really tiring.

I have ADD, I was clinically disagnosed when I was 16. I think my mind has a tendency to shoot around all over the place, and sometimes I end up making connections that other people might not, just because I have thought about it in like, 50 ways. Now granted, 49 of them might be stupid – but if you have one additional idea that’s useful. I think the PhD was really good for me because there’s some component of lab work, there’s some component of field work, there are some components of doing the actual PhD, and then there’s teaching stuff. You can flip between those, and you can always have something to do. So I actually thought it was a really nice balance for me!