Profile

I am originally from Wales and now live in Cambridgeshire, England. I love travelling, rock music and food!

I have been lucky and have been to many countries including Australia, USA, New Zealand, Italy, Greece ( & islands), Iceland, Spain (& islands) and others but am looking forward to going to Canada for the first time later this year.

I have a black cat called Olive who has just turned 1 and when I have free time I love to bake. I once baked 83 cupcakes do to the main sections of the periodic table (with a different flavour for each group)! I also enjoy going to see bands play live and hanging out with friends. We play a lot of boardgames (e.g. Ticket to ride, Muchkin, 7 wonders etc) and enjoy watching films.

As well as my normal job I do a lot of charity work for a science organisation called SCI by helping them with Facebook and Twitter. Through them I was lucky enough to go to the Houses of Parliament in London and was able to question MP’s on science. Whilst there we all had a message from Tim Peake (the astronaut) while he was in space!

I check different medicines and figure out how to test new ones.

Previously I worked for a number of different laboratories. This included a lab where I tested hair samples for drugs and a university where I tested for metals in lots of different things such as plants, river sediment, skin and others samples. As well as this I helped test pee samples for drugs for the 2012 Olympics and 2014 Commonwealth games to make sure the athletes weren’t cheating.

So being an analytical scientist allows me to be very versatile!

I now work for a company called Intertek Melbourn which is a contract laboratory. This means we work with lots of different companies on lots of different medicines. For example where I work helps companies to answer many questions about the medicines they make, such as:

Medicine stability – how long can a medicine be used for before it ‘goes off’? Does it last the same amount of time in the UK compared to a country with a hotter climate?

Medicine identity – does it contain the correct medicine and the right amount? How pure is it?

Tablets – do they dissolve in your stomach or small intestine properly? If it has a coating, is it hard enough?

Inhalers – do they give the right dose each time you press it? How much goes into each part of your lung?

The medicines are examined by lots of different techniques – shining lasers to see how the molecules dance (inferred spectroscopy), heating it up into a gas (gas chromatography), shining light to see if they absorb it (Ultra Violet analysis) or breaking it up into small pieces (mass spectrometry).

Each day I do something very different. However some examples of what I may do include making solutions, using pieces of equipment to examine samples and trying to figure out how to examine a brand new medicine that has never been tested before.

One type of equipment I use regularly is called a HPLC. This separates out the ingredients of the sample and uses light to help identify them. Another type of equipment I use is called a mass spectrometer. This blows up a sample into lots of little pieces and can help you figure out how a molecule fits together – like a jig-saw puzzle!