Profile

I live just outside Edinburgh on the edge of the Pentland Hills with my wife, who is also a scientist. We have a wee boy who is almost 2 years old.

I grew up in Glasgow and moved to Edinburgh to go to university. After university I worked for the NHS as a Biomedical Scientist for 4 years.

In 2010 my wife moved to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, for a few years to work so I moved there too and worked as a Research Assistant in a big lab with lots of exciting research about skeletal muscle and how it repairs itself and what happens when this doesn’t work properly.

When we moved home to Scotland in 2014 I got a job in Edinburgh also as a Research Assistant but working on a different research area, this time liver cancer.

This is the Boulter lab group that i’m a part of. Just like any team we all have different roles and skills and we work together to help each other.

I still work there but i’m about to leave my job to start a PhD in September. It’ll take me 4 years to finish and will be a lot of work but, for me, will be a dream come true!

When I’m not at work our son keeps us very busy but I try and make time for my own interests. I like riding bikes, running up and down mountains and taking photos and videos of my adventures.

I believe that it’s always the perfect weather to BBQ, the best books ever written are “The Lies of Locke Lamora” by Scott Lynch and “The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, “Local Hero” is the best comedy film ever made but “Blade Runner” is a more timeless classic and that Deadpool should be a member of The Avengers.

My pronouns are he/him.

I work on a type of Cancer called Cholangiocarcinoma. It occurs in the Bile Ducts in the Liver. Bile Ducts are tubes in the Liver that carry Bile from the Liver to your intestines to help digest food.

Sometimes these tubes can become damaged or inflamed and when that happens your body tries to repair itself. We’re trying to understand how it does that and what goes wrong when it doesn’t manage to fix itself.

This is a diagram of a human Liver, it’s the dark red part. The Bile Ducts are the green tubes

If we had a microscope to zoom in we would be able to see these parts of the Liver, here you can see the Bile duct in green.

Sometimes, over a long period of time, this can lead to cancer but at the moment we’re not entirely sure why this is. It’s likely to be a combination of things like your genetics, mutations that might occur in the DNA of liver cells and lifestyle.

At the moment the only real treatment is to have surgery to remove the cancer and possibly a liver transplant. If we can understand why the cancer is happening and what the cells in the liver are doing then it’s possible we can develop a treatment to help patients that have Cholangiocarcinoma.

You can read more about our Lab Group here: https://www.ed.ac.uk/mrc-human-genetics-unit/research/boulter-group

I cycle or run to work and try and get started by 8am.

A lot of my time is spent in the lab at my bench where I have my own space for doing experiments or in an office a share where I have a desk with a computer.

I use experiments to try and answer questions we have. Experiments can take anywhere from a day to several weeks to do and then you usually have to spend some time looking at the results and trying to work out what they tell you. Experiments always tell you something.

I do a lot of my experiments with cells that I grow in a dish. It’s a bit like gardening, you have to feed and water the cells with the right nutrients and chemicals to help them grow properly.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the results I get in my experiments. I have to think about what they mean and how i can explain them to other scientists and people that aren’t scientists. Communication is a really important part of my job, telling people about our results and the work we do is really important.

Once a week we get together as a lab group to eat cake and talk about the work we’ve been doing, what results we’ve got and if we’re having any problems. It’s a great opportunity to share what you’ve been up to and get some feedback on your work.

I have to finish and leave work by 4pm to get home and pick my son up from nursery.

This is what part of our lab looks like, never believe what you see on TV, labs never look that tidy!

This is the outside of the building I work it, it’s always a sunny day in Edinburgh!

We’re lucky that we get such a great view of the city from the top floor. Yes, that’s the castle right there!

We have a cafe and common area for chatting, social events or informal meetings.

This is our seminar room where we hear about the exciting work others are doing in the building and also from visiting scientists from the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.

For a number of years now i’ve made short videos as a hobby, last year I vlogged my training over 6 months for the West Highland Way Race and published it on YouTube. I’m about to begin a PhD in Regenerative Medicine that will take me four years to complete. I’m keen to use video content, live streaming and podcasting to tell students about this adventure and continue making educational and inspiring content aimed at encouraging secondary school pupils to consider careers in science and technology.

I already have some of my own equipment to do this but I would use the prize money to purchase equipment aimed at improving the quality of my productions.