Profile

I’m Helena and I am a final year PhD student at both the Natural History Museum in London, where I spend most of my time, and the University of Oxford. I grew up in London and haven’t actually ever moved out of the city. I currently live with my boyfriend, our two cats, a gecko and one of those robot hoovers, which is the best purchase I ever made and I consider him to be our fourth pet.

I’ve always loved space, I think I always wanted to make it into a career, I just didn’t know that it was an option. When I was a kid I wanted to be an ice figure skater or a car designer, until someone told me that studying space could be my job. I worked hard at physics, but I really struggled with maths. It was only really after I left school and began to see what maths could be used for in a way that interested me, that I got a little better.

Because of my struggle with maths I decided to not study physics at university, but instead applied for geology and geophysics, which is the study of the Earth and the processes that formed it. I remember at a university open day someone said to me ‘geology is the study of rocks, and not just rocks on Earth!’ so from then on I was sold. I did a Bsc and MSci at Imperial College in London, and then I’ve ben doing my PhD in planetary science at the Natural History Museum and Oxford since 2016.

Outside of work I like reading, I’m a big sci fi fan, and gaming – although I’m pretty terrible so always have the difficulty set on easy mode. My token random hobby is nails and nail art – I love doing my nails and creating interesting designs on them (although having very long nails sometimes means they poke through gloves when I’m in the lab). It’s such a good activity to take your mind of everything else, because you have to be so focussed. Aside from that, I enjoy sleeping, napping, dozing, snoozing…

The big picture questions which I am trying to answer are basically what was going on at the beginning of the Solar System. The early Solar System was filled with lots of activity, lots of material and lots of unknowns. There were huge numbers of rocky bodies, all colliding together and in some cases growing larger and larger. Some were lucky enough to grow into planets, scooping up all the other smaller bodies and incorporating them into themselves.

There is, however, some left over material from this absolutely chaotic period, in the form of asteroids. These are small bodies which orbit the sun and were never incorporated into other planets. They never grew large enough to become planets themselves, and that means that they never had any of the processes we associate with planets now, like volcanoes and earthquakes. These processes change the rocks the planets are made up of, but the rocks that make up asteroids haven’t changed since the early Solar System. They act as little snapshots into that period I am interested in.

On Earth we are so, so lucky to have little pieces of those asteroids as meteorites. These are rocks which have been knocked off asteroids and have flown through space, fallen through our atmosphere, probably landed somewhere remote like Antarctica, and then picked up and handed to me. Amazing!

I take the meteorites and try to work out what they are made of, and what has happened to them when they were still part of a larger asteroid. Meteorites have shown us that there are lots of different types of asteroids: some were large, some were small, but the meteorites I look at look as though they were exposed to water. That means the asteroid they came from had water on it in some form or another!

Water is obviously an incredibly important material when thinking about the emergence of life, or the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system, so these meteorites and asteroids are really important to study. I am trying to work out the history of these bodies, where in the Solar System they came from, and whether right at the beginning of Earth’s history, bodies like the ones I study delivered water to our planet?

Before the lockdown my days were a little more varied than they are now. Now I wake up, put on my day pyjamas and work at my makeshift desk. At the moment I am in the finishing stages of my PhD so I spend my days writing up my thesis, which is a book of all the research and work I have been doing over the past 3-4 years. I try to break the writing process up by arranging virtual coffees, or organising to give talks online. I have also been doing a lot of online outreach which is a great change of pace for me.

Before the lockdown though, I didn’t have a typical routine. Most days I would rock up at the museum (probably later than I should, I am terrible in the morning) and check emails and plan my tasks for the day. I try (even now) to keep regular hours, but I will admit I am terrible at keeping to routine, and sometimes I can get caught up in whatever I am doing and would leave the museum later.

Earlier in my project I did a lot of lab work, which meant my day varied hugely depending on the instrument I was using. Some instruments required me to spend all day in the lab making sure that everything was running smoothly, but others needed me only for setup, and then I could leave the machine running. I also spent a large chunk of my first few years in our clean lab, preparing the meteorites for analysis. Our clean labs have no windows and so some days I would go without seeing daylight, which was probably not helped by the hours and hours of true crime podcasts I would listen too. Honestly though, those are some of my favourite times, using my hands and focussing completely on one task.