Profile

I’m a PhD student studying biochemistry/immunology at Queen’s University Belfast. I did my undergraduate degree in Biotechnology at the University of Galway, which included an 8-month exchange at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Outside the lab, I stay active at the gym, playing padel with friends, or hiking around Belfast. I also have a big interest in event management and have worked at concerts and festivals across Ireland, so naturally I love discovering new artists and catching live music.

Inflammation is your body’s way of fighting off bacterial infections and healing injuries. Special complexes in our immune system can sense these danger signals and promote this inflammatory response. I study how tiny protein tags (known as ubiquitin) gets added to proteins inside your cells, which acts like a switch to turn inflammation on or off. Understanding this regulation can help find new ways to treat diseases where the body’s immune system attacks itself.

I usually arrive at the lab around 9am, have a large coffee and start by checking emails and planning what I want to get done. Some days are heavy on experiments, where I might be growing cells, preparing samples, or running them through the mass spectrometer (a machine that tells me exactly what’s going on with the proteins in my cells, including the tiny changes I’m studying). Other days I spend more time at my computer, analysing data or reading other lab’s research papers. I also have regular meetings with my supervisors to chat through my results and plan next steps, and I catch up with my lab mates throughout the day, having more coffee or lunch together. I usually head home around 5 or 6pm, though sometimes experiments run longer than planned.