Meet the scientists!

It’s amazing, nearly all animals and plants have a way to tell what time of day it is and then adjust how their internal organs work and how they behave according to that. I mostly study genes that are involved in this ‘body clock’.

It is a very complicated process but generally, they mostly tell the time of day by the number of hours of sunlight. And the adjustments in the body take place in a variety of organs, in animals, breathing and heart rate is different at night, the stomach starts producing digestive juices ahead of normal meal times ready to digest the food when it’s eaten, there are lots more examples too but I won’t go into all of them here. In some animals, as it gets closer to winter, their fur changes colour to white in order to stay hidden in the snow. Behaviour is different too – for example, the hottest part of the day or times when predators are out are times when animals choose to stay hidden.

My work is mostly in the field of molecular biology – which means looking at how certain genes and proteins interact with each other. I spend a lot of time working with small fiddly tubes using a variety of techniques to investigate this. Currently I’m working with mice but I used to work with fruit flies, always on clocks though! But this is a VERY brief overview, feel free to ask questions if it doesn’t make sense

Once a week, we have a lab meeting, everyone within my lab group – which includes the head of the lab, post-docs like me (but there’s only me at the moment!), PhD students (2), masters, Erasmus or undergraduate students (4) and research technicians (1) – get together and tell each other what work we have been doing. Doing this gives us a chance to discuss the project as everyone within a single lab group works on related but slightly different topics. We can get advice, hints, tips and co-ordinate our activities. My university has hundreds of different lab groups like this, all working on different projects.

Because I work on the body clock, sometimes I need to disrupt my own body clock by coming into work throughout the day and night – this is not pleasant and I try to make sure that this is scheduled so that I can don’t have to do it too often!

At the moment I am supervising some undergraduate students so I try to have regular meetings with them to check that they are progressing well or whether they need any assistance or advice.

I’ve been to some science festivals before and they’re a great way to talk to the public about science. You can set up something exciting and fun to do and go see a lot yourself.

I would set up an exhibit or some sort of hands-on activity about either clocks, fruit fly research or genetics – this will depend on the festival that I can join in on, sometimes they have a theme.