Profile

After high school I worked in a warehouse until I’d saved up enough to travel to South America for 6 months. It was such a great experience that made me see life differently! When I got back I started studying Chemical Engineering at Loughborough University.

I then spent a year working in a sugar factory as an engineer and another year at a bank as a “Business Analyst” (that’s basically someone who looks at the banks data to help them make the right choices). After that I was self employed as a musician and a handyman for three years! 🔨🎸

Now I’m in my favourite job of all, researching bacteria! I still have time to play music on the weekends too!

I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot and experience lots of different kinds of jobs.

Some bacteria have the ability to get all the resources they need from hydrogen, CO2 and some common salts. I’m looking at how we can best turn these bacteria into protein rich foods!

If you want to grow plant based food, you need to have fertile land to grow it on. Unlike plants, these bacteria get their energy from hydrogen instead of the sun, so we don’t need to use any fertile land. This means we can capture CO2 AND make more food without having to chop down any forests to make space!

I think this is really exciting and I love that I get to grow these bacteria every day and see how they react to being grown under different conditions.

On a typical day, I cycle to work in the morning and check on the reactors where I grow my bacteria. I make sure they are still alive and growing well. Unexpected things occur on a regular basis and there’s a lot of problem solving in figuring out how to fix things! As an example; a pump may have stopped working and I need to figure out why and how to fix the problem!

I will take samples from the reactors and run tests on them. These experiments produce tonnes of data so a lot of my day is taken up trying to understand what the data is saying. This usually involves making graphs or writing code that will make the graphs for me!

If I still have time after running experiments and managing the resulting data, I might read some scientific papers or write up my own results so someone else can understand them!