Meet the scientists!

I’m a developmental biologist, so I study embryos to find out how they grow and shape themselves to make all our body parts. This also involves chemistry and physics and so I get to think about lots of different areas of science. I am in charge of a research group of five people. Our  current question is how do parts of the body (limbs, jaws, structures in your inner ear, tubes in your kidneys, etc.) grow longer rather than just bigger when you’re developing from an embryo. Do the cells all change shape, or do they rearrange themselves in line (like forming a queue) or do they just proliferate (divide) on one side? Or a combination of these? Recently we’ve been looking at cell shapes sizes and found a way to have a map of these for any part of the body and got some surprising results about the roof of your mouth (ask me!).

What I like about my typical day is that it is full of ideas. Sometimes it will be discussing the details of a technical problem with an experiment. Why didn’t this experiment work? How can we fix it? Once in a while I help with the experiments myself. Other times I’ll be writing a project proposal for a grant application, often reading about what others have done and deciding where we go next. Should we be doing more about how the brain develops, or follow up our exciting results on the structure of the face? I might be writing up some of our results for publication. That includes designing the pictures as well as writing the words. I sometimes give lectures to university undergraduates about my subject, which is fun because they’re really interested and the lectures have to be different each year because the research is fast-moving in my area.

I very much want to “spread the word” of science to schools, so the money will help pay for travel to schools I’ll be visiting throughout the year and for improvements to my website (which I admit is not so good).