Profile

I started working on cancer 15 years ago. Cancers are illnesses caused when the cells in our bodies become damaged and make too many new cells. This causes lumps called tumours that damage our normal cells and make us ill.

At first I was trying to find new genes that stop the cells in our bodies from becoming a cancer. I found one gene called WWOX which kills cells if they become a cancer.

After finding this gene I wanted to find out how it works. By switching the WWOX gene on or off inside cancer cells I can see what happens to the cells. I found that WWOX changed how sticky the cancer cells are (which lets the cancer spread around the body), and my student found that WWOX helps make one of the drugs we use to cure cancer work even better.

I hope that understanding WWOX more will help us to make our cancer drugs even better.

A lot of my time in this job is spent preparing lectures and other teaching sessions, or spending a lot of time completing administrative work. This includes things like planning changes to the courses we teach, answering questions from students or dealing with problems they have, planning experiments, ordering chemicals, and attending meetings about strategy or quality.

There are always lots of emails that need answering.

To do experiments involves not only lab work, but also planning your spending, writing applications to get money to do the work, publishing your results in science journals, reading about other peoples work, sharing ideas with other scientists. Most days involve at least some of this.