Profile

I live in Oxford in a flat with my friendly cat called Mr Wickham (I say my cat, its more like the neighbourhoods cat but my flat is definitely his favourite sunning spot). I spend my weekends hiking out into the countryside for an adventure either here in Oxford or with my boyfriend in Sussex. I love nature, and hunting and photographing new butterflies is one of my favourite things to do. I’m always on the look out for new and exciting recipes and have never been known to pass up the offer of a cup of tea and cake!

I am a neuroscientist based in Oxford with two big interests:

For my PhD I used Oxfords very high powered MRI machine (theres only a few in the whole of the UK) to investigate the human brain at a super detailed level. I was particularly interested in how our brain organises what we see. When we look at a picture for example, the things that we see, such as colours or shapes, each have their own special pathways to follow. We wanted to learn more about these pathways and to see them in action using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) on our mega magnet.

Now that I have finished my PhD I use MRI to look at the brains of people who have smoked over a period of many years and now have trouble with their breathing. Sometimes these people who have trouble with their breathing can feel more anxious than we would expect. I am interested in how these peoples brains differ from people who don’t smoke and in making links between how people feel about their breathing and their brains activity. These differences might help us understand why some people feel more worried than others when they can’t breathe and allow us to develop treatments to retrain their brains.

We normally see two participants per week and on those days we are very busy! We meet them at 10am and they complete a big list of questionnaires that ask them about their breathing and generally how they feel. I leave the volunteer working on these with one of our researchers and go to work at my computer, coding and thinking about new ways to look at our data is a big part of my job.

At lunch time we MRI scan our participant, they have to be carefully checked for metal as it is very important not to take loose metal into the scanner as you can see if you click this link

(embed)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBx8BwLhqg[/embed]

After the participant has had their scan, which lasts around 1 hour, they do some more tests for their breathing and some computer games. While they do this I look at the MRI pictures to make sure it is good quality and do some basic analysis straight away.

After the participant has left at around 3pm I meet with some of our other team members to book in new participants and take some time to read any research papers that might help me to think in new ways. It is very important to know what other people are doing and to see how our work can fit in with this.

The great thing about being a researcher is that you can be very flexible with when and where you work. Sometimes I leave work early but often I have a very interesting question to answer and I find that I’m still working on it at 9pm. It never feels like work because we have so many questions and we know might be able to help people if we answer them.