Profile

My research is all about exercise and why people exercise less as they get older. Specifically I would like to find out more about what happens inside muscle cells (myocytes) before, during and after doing a bit of exercise. It’s also interesting to find out why some people could respond better to training than others (figure 1) .

I spend a lot of time with people, I ask them to exercise while I attach different things to their legs, arms, waist and even covering their face (figure 2) . My laboratory looks a bit like a mini-gym (figure 3) .

When I’m at my desk I fit slopes and curves to the data that I have collected. For example, I measure oxygen in the muscle and if I stop oxygen being delivered to that muscle (with a very tight cuff) I can watch the oxygen go down as it is being used up by the muscle. That slope is called the muscle oxygen consumption (or muscleVO2) (figure 4) .

I am also interested in how heart-health effects muscle health because muscle strength has been linked to cardiovascular disease (Figure 5) . Sometimes I help the imaging team out by using ultrasound to take pictures of the participants hearts, this is called Echocardiography (Figure 6) .

There isn’t really a typical day because I try to get involved with lots of projects so that takes me out of the lab/office quite a bit. I also like going to conferences to present my data and hear about what other folk are doing. This is something which is BRILLIANT about being a scientist, especially when the conferences are held in exciting locations (such as the edge of Lake Garda in Italy) (Figure 7) 😉