Profile

I live in Bristol but work in Bath so I have to cycle up the steepest hill ever to get up to Bath Uni. I enjoy playing guitar and used to play in a punk band; we toured Europe 4 times (3 times we only used public transport). I have recently learned to freedive (hardcore snorkelling) and have held my breath for 3mins 32seconds. I can also burp on command.

Plankton are tiny plants and animals that live in the world’s waterways; every river, lake, puddle, pond, sea and ocean has got plankton floating in it. I study PHYTOplankton which are the microscopic plants. Phytoplankton produce 80% of the oxygen that keeps us alive, form the basis of 99.9% marine food webs, form clouds and reduce the effect of global warming by absorbing CO2. So they’re pretty important.

I’m trying to find out how their shape plays a part in helping different species survive in different environments. I get populations of phytoplankton and put them in large tanks called mesocosms. I then subject them to different conditions and see which species survive. I then scan and count them using different types of microscopes. I am hoping to produce 3D printed models of different species so I can test how different shapes perform hydrodynamically. Fingers crossed it’ll work!

I have recently come back from working in the Weddell Sea (nr Antarctica) with the British Antarctic Survey where I was learning new techniques to measure mixing in the ocean. We accidentally discovered an underwater mountain the size of one of the Alps.

Being a marine scientist, you tend to spend an intensive period out in the field gathering data. Sometimes, you are working as part of a team to sample things for 24-hours a day over a two-week period. Once you have your data, it’s a case of trying to see if there’s a pattern or a story in what you measured.

This can involve a lot of time staring at a computer screen or holed up in a lab as you process all the data you’ve got. Some of the data sets we produce are so large that they won’t even fit in Excel; most of them are multidimensional (difficult to imagine with a tiny human brain) so I have to write computer code to help me process all the data and see if there’s any patterns!