Meet the scientists!

Each month the ovary ruptures to release an egg and heals again without any scars forming. This is unique because most organs including your skin develop scars after they are injured. This means that the ovary heals in a special way from other organs and tissues.

This is an ovary releasing an egg.

We think that the hormones which are made in the ovary also protects the ovary from developing scars. By finding out how the ovary heals without scarring we can develop new medication to prevent people developing scars in the future.

This is important for people who have abdominal surgery as they can develop internal scars as well as other groups of people like those on special types of dialysis (peritoneal dialysis). These internal scars can cause extreme pain, make some women infertile and sometimes even cause organ failure.

To study this I run experiments on cells:

I grow cells from the ovary and compare them to the same type of cell from elsewhere in the abdominal cavity to see if they behave differently.

I treat the ovary cells and abdominal cells with hormones and see which hormones can stop the cells producing proteins which will make a scar.

I also grow the cells in a petrie dish where they grow in a single layer on the bottom. I then make a “scar” in the cell layer and watch over time as it heals to see what hormones can affect the cells healing.

https://vimeo.com/389901844

I keep a photo-blog of my day to day work as a PhD student. Basically each day I take one photo of what I am doing and upload it.

Being a PhD student can be very stressful and we often spend weeks (sometimes months, even years) repeating the same experiments over and over again. In the end it all blurs into one memory and sometimes we can forget just how hard we worked for one graph.

I think it will be good to look back on all my photos to see what I was doing each day during my PhD, hopefully I will have lots of happy memories but I expect there will be lots of moaning too.

I think this sums up my typical day more than words.