Profile

Every human being has trillions of cells, each of which have around a trillion protein molecules inside them. I study how these molecules bind to one another and assemble into the pieces of molecular machinery which perform everyday biological tasks, from converting food to energy to movement, healing damaged tissue, keeping infections at bay, and maintaining all your organs in good shape. This is important for understanding how life works in healthy cells, but is also important for disease. For instance, protein binding is used to send signals between different parts of the cell, which tell the cell when its a good time to grow and divide. However if this system is broken, the cell can grow and divide uncontrollably and form a tumor, which could lead to cancer.

I walk to work, but other than that most days are unique. Sometimes I spend days on end writing computer programs to solve a problem I’m working on, other days I will sit and think about the problem, or read papers by other scientists who have tackled it. If I have results I think are good enough to publish, I will talk thorough them with other people in my lab and write a manuscript outlining my investigations. Sometimes I spend all day looking at computer generated images of a protein molecule, trying to understand which parts are important or figuring out how the protein would change if it had a mutation.