Profile

I live in Bonnyrigg, which is just south of Edinburgh, with my husband, 2 children and our crazy black cat.

I love being outside.  I have a summerhouse at the bottom of the garden where I keep all my art stuff.  I’m not very good at gardening but I like to pretend I do!

I like to watch/read crime dramas and novels, especially the recent series of ‘Line of Duty”.

I’m really good at Candy Crush.

The core facility I manage is located across 2 labs and houses equipment costing in excess of £1.5M.  Facilities tend to come about when the technology and the experience required to run the technology well, is too expensive for just one research group to keep going.  There are 3 people in my team and the technology we work with is called flow cytometry.  This technology is used to identify cell populations and can even sort them.  Essentially our body is made up of different cell types which have different functions and they have different markers on their surface.  We can bind antibodies to these markers and add coloured dyes to the antibodies.  We then use a fluid system to introduce the cell samples into the body of the instrument, which also contains lasers.  These excite the dyes and the resulting light information is picked up by detectors which then relays the data to a computer for us to analyse.

It’s an amazing mix of biology, chemistry and physics.

Flow Cytometry Data

Detectors

Sort Chamber

Working in a core facility is a really interesting area of research as we get to meet lots of researchers and assist in many different projects.

My working day is rarely typical.  As Flow Cytometry facility manager, it’s my team’s responsibility to ensure that the facility equipment is working well.  Therefore, our first duty each day is to switch on and QC all our instruments. This usually takes about 1 hour, assuming that everything passes OK.  Often, we have to arrange for engineer visits, either for system maintenance or for repairs.

We also ensure that the lab housekeeping is done – ordering, filling up consumables and emptying liquid and solid waste.

E-mails then need to be answered. We have an online booking system for cell sorting and assistance requests.  These requests are submitted to a facility e-mail account and booking allocated to our online diaries.

Next is usually training sessions or user meetings.  We run both theory and practical training courses.

A lot of my day is dependent on the users bookings and patient samples and it’s important that I am aware of recent advances in the field so that I can optimise experiments. Users rely on our expertise for their experimental plans.

As we are a stand-alone facility, I manage our lab’s internal invoicing, and business plans while the team is currently looking at our sustainability position and “big data” processing.

Although we are a university academic facility, we are also open to commercial researchers and are involved with the Innovations team, setting up contracts for access.

Sometimes, I have to plan presentations for user meetings or organise inhouse seminars. I am/have been on committees for both the Scottish and UK Flow Cytometry Societies.  These provide an interesting contrast to my daily workload and are important for expanding my personal career development.

All in all, my days tend to be quite unique and best of all I never have to clock-watch.

The team

Our lab is often a calling point during building tours – from school pupils to charity sponsors, politicians to HRHs.  It’s an interesting stop because of the impressive equipment and the colourful data.  Plus lasers are always a talking point.  Core facilities are usually run by technical staff and it is an interesting and accessible career.  However, although most core facilities are open to public engagement, it is often difficult to convey a deeper understanding of the technology and their purpose within research projects.  I would like to work with the core facilities (flow cytometry, genomics, mass spectrometry, microscopy etc) in our institute/college to improve our ability to do this by introducing this to local schools and show this career possibility which has grown dramatically in recent years.  The average number of facility staff in core facilities in 1999 was 1 and now it is 4 and still growing.  I would use the prize money to create fun demo equipment and develop workshops for this purpose.