Profile
Joanna Greenman
My CV
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Education:
Cottingham High School and Sixth Form College
Durham University (Undergraduate)
York University (Postgraduate) -
Current Job:
PhD Student in Mechanistic Biology at the University of York
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About Me:
I really love being busy and active. So I am always up for learning a new skill, trying any sport on offer and chatting to my friends.
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I am a PhD student doing research in an area of biology known as immunology and haematology. This basically means I look at the cells of the immune system (those that fight infection) and blood cells.
You might have heard of platelets, these are cells in your blood that are best knowing for clotting. So if you cut yourself, the cells around the wound send signals which call for platelets to come and block up the wound so that you stop bleeding. However, scientists have recently started to think that platelets are also able to fight infection, so they might act like an immune cell.
So I am really interested in trying to find out how and if platelets are able to tell other immune cells what to do during an infection.
In particular I look at an infection with a very funny long complicated name called Schistosomias (it’s very hard to say 3 times quickly). It’s pronounced shis-toe-so-mi-asis. This is caused by a worm parasite that is found in the water and rivers of many poorer countries. When people become infected they become very ill and have a very poor quality of life. If people don’t get the right treatment they can actually die. There is a drug that can clear the infection, but it doesn’t stop people getting re-infected again.
So we want to see if we can find out what cells are talking to each other and if we can find another way of treating these people.
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My Typical Day:
I try and get up and into work early so I can have some time to plan my day and experiments before everyone else arrives. I’ll normally go into the lab, gather together everything I need for the experiments and do final checks that everything is working. Then I get started and normally end up running around (well walking quickly as running is not allowed) like a mad thing for the rest of the day, getting cells, counting cells, labelling cells and imaging cells.
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On a Monday morning I like to make sure I have a plan for the week. I also have a lab meeting on a Monday morning where all the people in the lab group come together and share what we have done that week and discuss our Progress, Problems and Plans. It’s a great time to find out what everyone is doing and ask for help if you are struggling or your experiment isn’t working.
My experiments come in waves, I will have some weeks where I spend hours and hours and hours in the lab doing hands-on experiments. These weeks are great fun, but also very tiring. But other weeks I am sitting at my computer, analysing the data from those busy experiment weeks, reading what other lab groups around the world have recently been doing and planning the next experiments I want to do.
The experiments I do require a lot of planning in advance, because we have to set up the infection model, this can take up to 6-12 weeks until the infection is at the stage where we are ready to to an experiment on. These experiments are known as in vivo, meaning in living creature. But I also do in vitro, meaning in test-tube experiments, these don’t take as long to do so I will almost always have some of these experiments continuously running.
My day is normally from 9-6pm, but this varies quite a lot, because once you have started an experiment you can’t often leave it and come back to it another day because your cells will have died. So those days can go on until 9pm (but I then have some shorter other days to make up for it)!
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I really want to be able to go into schools, both primary and secondary and give kids the chance to ask all those questions they might have and have a little chance of exploring answers themselves.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Hardworking, enthusiastic, shy
What did you want to be after you left school?
Scientist
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Not really
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