Profile

I live with my husband and daughter near Aberdeen in Scotland. We have a dog, two cats, budgies, geese, ducks, turkeys and hens to count (including lots of chicks just now) and a BIG field.  My favourite food is curry and I sing all the time!

Used to spend my spare time running my daughter between activities… choir, dancing, basketball… obviously not just now!

My work focuses on finding out how medically important fungi cause infection and disease. Fungi can cause irritating infections like Athlete’s foot or thrush, but in some patients also cause life-threatening disease

In my work, we investigate various properties of fungi to see if they are involved in the ability of the fungus to cause disease. This involves knocking out genes and analysing differences in behaviour. In addition, we are also able to look at how the host behaves during development of disease. We can analyse both the host immune response or we can analyse changes in host gene expression during development of disease. This has become easier with sequencing of host genomes, as we can now analyse gene expression across the whole genome by DNA microarray analysis – very cool!!!!!

I especially enjoy my work because you get to travel the world to attend conferences and speak about your work!  I have attended conferences in Tokyo (Japan), Melbourne (Australia), Taiwan and many USA cities, as well as various conferences in the UK

This is one of the things that I love about my job… there is no such thing as a typical day. Some days I will be in the lab all day (bliss!) and other days I may be stuck in front of a computer writing scientific papers, dealing with administration, writing grant applications or even analysing data. Other days I might be stuck in meetings about teaching or dealing with running the University or I might be teaching undergraduate or postgraduate students – this can be small group teaching, lectures or practical classes. The days when I can teach and work in the lab are some of my favourite days.

Just now everything is being done online from home… very strange times!