Profile
Luke Bryden
My CV
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Education:
I went to Keswick School for secondary school, including my A-levels. I then went to the University of Manchester to study Pharmacology with Industrial Experience. My industrial experience was a one-year research placement at a pharmaceutical company (Boehringer Ingelheim) in Germany. Following my undergraduate degree, I was offered a place on the Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Programme in Neuroscience, which funded a Master’s in Neuroscience (1 year) followed by a PhD (3 years).
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Qualifications:
I gained 11 GCSE’s, an AS level in English Language, and A levels in Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics. I have a bachelor’s degree in Pharmacology with Industrial Experience, a master’s in Neuroscience, and I am currently in the final year of doctorate (PhD) in Neuroscience.
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Work History:
During school holidays (and at weekends), I cleaned holiday cottages to earn some money. I also did work experience at a vet practice when I thought that I wanted to be a vet (when I was ~14/15 years old).
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Current Job:
I am currently a PhD student. This is not technically a job, but I am paid a stipend (which is the same as a salary, basically) and put in the hours of work that I would do if I was in full-time employment. So, I see it as a job!
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About Me:
I enjoy nature, food and spending time with good friends.
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In normal times I live in the lovely city of Oxford. Currently, I am at my mum’s house in the also lovely Lake District while the UK-wide lockdown is in place. I have my little pal Louis the pug here, too – when he trots into the study he is a welcome distraction from work!
I love to cook and bake, especially with friends at the weekend as food is best when eaten with others. A friend and I have an allotment plot together, which is a great place to get away from it all, and, because I (usually) live in a flat, it serves as a green outdoors space for a barbecue in the summer.
I met my boyfriend, Jono, when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in pharmacology at the University of Manchester. He still lives there, so I am often there seeing him at the weekends!
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The laboratory in which I work studies the parts of the brain that control movement and what changes happen in these parts of the brain in disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is a disease that usually affects older people and make it difficult for them to move around normally. Controlling movement relies on a chemical messenger called dopamine, which is made by a small group of nerve cells located deep within the brain. Some of these dopamine-making nerve cells die in people who have Parkinson’s disease, and this death of cells, what we call degeneration, is thought to be the main cause of the symptoms, including shaking and slowness of movement. Just behind the dopamine-making cells that die in Parkinson’s disease are a group of cells called ‘retrorubral field dopamine neurons’, which we know much less about. I study these nerve cells in the healthy brain and want to find out more about what they do.
We often have visitors to the lab, and I sometimes am involved in showing them what we do on a day-to-day basis. Here I am showing an experimental method to a visitor:
To study the parts of the brain I am interested in, I use the brains of mice. Some researchers, like myself, use mice for their research because they have similar parts of the brain to humans and serve as a good model for research. To study these brains, we need to look at them under a microscope as the cells of the brain are not visible to the naked eye. To be able to look at the brain under a microscope, I cut it very (very, very) thinly using a machine called a vibratome. These brain sections are 50 microns thick – that is 0.05 millimetres; about the same width as a human hair! These thin sections can be placed on specially-designed pieces of glass that can then be put underneath a microscope for me to zoom in on the parts of the brain I am interested in. This is something I spend a lot of my time doing when I am at work.
Here is an image of some nerve cells in the mouse brain. These cells have been labelled with a special dye that allows me to see nerve cells under the microscope:
I know that these cells are dopamine-making nerve cells (the group of nerve cells I am most interested in for my research) because the special dye I use is designed so that it only labels dopamine-making nerve cells.
Nerve cells in the brain ‘talk’ to each other in networks using tiny electrical signals. These networks are essential for things like controlling movement. Ultimately, the networks send instructions to muscles when we want to, say, move an arm. I can ‘listen’ to part of this ‘conversation’ in the living brain using a method called electrophysiology, which records signals from nerve cells. These signals are complicated, and different depending which nerve cells I record from. Here is an example of what a recording looks like!:
As well as doing experiments in the lab, a lot of my time is spent at my computer looking at and trying to understand the data that I create during my experiments. This is often a very time-consuming process – but I enjoy it!
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My Typical Day:
A day in the lab for me really varies, depending what experiments I have planned. On a typical day, I get to the lab around 8:30 in the morning and check my emails (there is more to my work than experiments, communication is a very important part of research). I will then use a very fancy microscope that allows me to take zoomed-in pictures of the parts of the brain I am interested in.
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On a typical day, I may spend an hour or two in the morning reading a new scientific article that is relevant to my research. These are published in journals and are usually good quality because other scientists read these papers and ensure the work is up to standard and accurate before publication.
I may then spend a few hours on the microscope taking images of the nerve cells I am interested in studying (see previous section for image). The microscope I work on most often is called a confocal microscope, which is a large and high-tech microscope that allows me to take high quality 3D images. I don’t have a photo of our microscope room, but here is a similar microscope:
I often have lunch with other people in my department, including other PhD students, post-doctoral scientists and research assistants.
In the afternoon I may spend time at my desk looking at data on my computer. This often involves using special software that helps me to make sense of the large amounts of data that I generate during my experiments. Analysing data thoroughly and accurately is an important part of research.
After work I often go to the gym, cook some nice food and read/watch TV. I like to get a good night’s sleep, so I go to bed quite early!
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
rational; curious; skeptical
What did you want to be after you left school?
I was not sure what job I wanted to do. I decided to study something I was interested in, hoping it would give me a better idea of what job I would enjoy afterwards.
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Not really.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Whitney Houston.
What's your favourite food?
I don't have a favourite!
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
i) to be more decisive; ii) have learnt to play piano when I was young; iii) to be fluent in German
Tell us a joke.
What is the most common owl in the UK? A tea towel.
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