Profile

I help other scientists to grow crystals of their interesting proteins and then to make sense of the information those crystals can show them. This means I can be looking at proteins from malarial parasites one day and drug receptors the next – all the variety keeps it interesting!

The day varies a great deal because I never know what project I will be working on next. One constant feature is that interesting proteins are almost always reluctant to grow crystals, so I spend a lot of my time trying to convince them to co-operate.

Two or three days a month I will spend at the synchrotron. This tends to involve a mix of training students in how to carry out the experiments and getting as much information as possible out of every crystal I have available to me. This takes a bit of thinking about, since the synchrotron X-rays are so bright that they will destroy the crystals very quickly.