Profile

I live near the University of Warwick (where I study!), with my girlfriend and almost seventy house plants. I love crafts, and have recently been teaching myself how to crochet. I also love The Great British Bake Off, napping, and playing Animal Crossing!

My pronouns are she/her.

This is my family’s dog – Max!

My work looks at river water bacteria, and to do that first of all you need a lot of river water!

This is how I get river water to study!

Often I need up to thirty litres of water from a local river to start a big experiment – that’s a lot of full buckets!

I take the water back to the lab and filter out any roots, leaves, and even bits of plastic pollution that are often floating in the water! The lab is where I spend most of my time, as setting up experiments can take quite a while.

One of my favourite parts of my experiments is putting some of my river water onto little dishes of agar – which is like nutritious bacteria-friendly jelly! They can grow into colonies (like a big pile of bacteria!) in loads of different shapes, sizes and colours… This can often tell me a lot about the types and amount of bacteria in the water at that time – as the species and numbers of bacteria in rivers changes constantly.

Agar plates can grow bacterial colonies in all different shapes and sizes!

One of the main goals of my work is to see how bacteria react to chemicals that can be found in the river, and so I spend a lot of time putting bacteria from the river into tubes with different chemicals, including things like medicines – often the bacteria are able to break the chemicals down (this is known as biodegradation), and when that happens I can record how long it takes them to do so! This should help us to know what chemicals can’t be broken down, and might stick around in the environment and encounter other organisms like fish.

My work usually starts with collecting and filtering litres and litres of water. I have to make up solutions of different chemicals I want to test my bacteria with, and add them to the water in little wells on what is known as a microtitre plate. When I count how many cells are in my sample, I use viable cells counts, as well as Flow Cytometry – which is a really fast way of dying my cells and asking a machine to count how many there are! Often to detect whether my bacteria have degraded a chemical that has a strong colour, I use spectrophotometry.