Profile

I live with my family in Oxford and enjoy exploring Oxford and Oxfordshire by bike and pushchair. I like all kinds of food except cucumber what I really dislike.

With the help of computer simulations I try to understand how micro-organisms such as bacteria or sperm cells move in the human body. Many bacteria rotate helical appendages attached at the end of their body which help them to move forward. I am investigating how such bacteria move in human body fluids such as blood or mucus. Mucus, for example, covers the lungs and stomach and act as a shield against bacterial invasion. Sometimes, however, these harmful bacteria can swim through mucus and attack your body. Also bacteria have to follow the laws of physics! And I am finding out which forces may help them to swim through or stop them to move.

In fact, there are not many typical days, most of them are very different from each other. Usually I work in my office in front of a computer, or doing calculations with pen and paper. There is a bunch of things I am doing at work, in a random order, but not every day the same things: Doing calculations with the computer and by hand, writing computer code, analysing the results from computer simulations, creating nice figures and movies from data, reading and answering E-mails, reading scientific papers, discussing with colleagues, skype calls with other scientists, writing scientific papers, and doing some administrative stuff (which is usually boring, in contrast to the other things).