Profile

Hi I’m Cameron,

This is me attempting a smile whilst getting lunch

I’m an LGBT scientist from Leeds. I’m from a working class background and I’m the first in my family to have a degree, masters and to be doing a PhD 🎓

Me at graduation with one of my supervisors

I love animals, science communication and plants 🌵 I sometimes sell them but collect hard to find species from around the world

I have been researching parasites 🧫 pathogenic diseases including cancer, sleeping sickness, and viral neurological diseases for the past 5 years 🔬

Previously I have worked in protein science where I have made proteins from marine life that fluoresce be expressed in parasites to see how they function

Green fluorescent protein in marine coral

Proteins I have used are green fluorescent and red fluorescent protein that I have put into parasite to see where proteins are found in the cells.

I have spent a lot of time looking down a microscope seeing the microscopic world in detail. Sometimes I throw bits of plants under there just to see what it looks like. I think they look really cool 

Onions cells on the left and the stem of a corn plant on the right. Images were take through a microscope at 100X magnification

In reality though I just spend a lot of time walking around in a lab coat thinking I’m on the set of CSI

Originally, I looked at human parasites and carried out a lot of protein expression and visualised them on special gels

SDS-PAGE a type of gel for looking at protein sizes

I utilise powerful microscopes to at the inner-workings of cells, including using cancer cells to see how viruses access tissues, and how they lead to cause diseases of the brain. If we can figure this out we can us them to treat diseases

HeLa cells, a type of cancer cell, and the inverted microscope I use to determine their health. The flasks I used to grow them in are next to the microscope

I use these cells to grow virus stocks which are later used within my experiments

I tend to start my day with a coffee in the office and reading a research paper or reviewing a previous experiment I did, such as a virus assay.

Virus plaque assay which is used to calculate how much virus I have made and how infective it is so I can standardise my experiments

After that I may be demonstrating in a lab, one of the classes I do is ‘The Microbial World’ where we talk about different bacteria and infections and how we can figure out what that infection is caused by.

These are some of the special growth mediums we use to help figure out what bacteria or fungi might be causing an illness

After my class I may in my lab were I will be preparing for an experiment, looking after my cell lines, or conducting an expeirement. I’ll often update with twitter account with some science news as well.

I’ll often check my results from an experiment in the morning, or put the figures together so it doesn’t have to be done at a later date.