Profile

Hello, I’m Adam,
I live with my wife in Birmingham and I have two much younger brothers who teach me about Fortnite, Love Island and all that stuff I’m too old for!
I’m a ‘mature’ PhD student, which means I did a lot of other things before coming to University, such as working in offices and on building sites, travelling abroad and working in Greece and South America. I’ve swum in the Amazon River and the Great Barrier Reef, and walked up a mountain in Peru (I don’t recommend it!).
For fun, I like to watch Sci-fi movies and race karts, pretending I’m Lewis Hamilton.
Oh and obviously I’m a big old nerd and proud of it.

We grow some cells in our laboratory, then collect lots of the little packages (vesicles) that they send to each other while they’re growing. We then put the packages under a laser beam, and catch the light that bounces off them.

The light that bounces back will change depending on what is in the package, for example, if the package has a lot of calcium in it, which might be good for building new bone, the light will look different to if the parcel has a lot of protein in it, which might be good for building new muscle.

If we can work out which ones are good for building bones, we can use them to make better treatments for people with weaker bones, such as older people.

I normally get into work around 8:15 and have a cup of tea while I read my emails, and chat to my friends. Then I’ll go and check on my cells, they can be very fussy! Too much heat and they die! Not enough food and they die! They’re like my pets! Some people like to talk to their cells like they do to their pets, not me though, I would never do anything that crazy 😉

After that I will collect the liquid that the cells have been growing in, and extract the packages (vesicles) by spinning the liquid extremely fast so the packages sink to the bottom. I will then put the collected packages onto my laser measuring machine, called a Raman spectroscope, which looks like a normal microscope. I will then spend hours taking lots of measurements and recording them all down to look at later.

Once that’s done I’ll have lunch.

After lunch, I will look at all the measurements I’ve recorded, do lots of calculations and graphs to see if they are telling me anything new about the packages I’m looking at.