Profile

I live in Dundee with my boyfriend. We have a new Labrador puppy called Mavis, and two Guinea Pigs called Links and Lorne! I’m originally from West Yorkshire, but I love living in Scotland and have lived here for 3 years now. I love vintage clothes and make my own dresses in my spare time. I also have a vast collection of earrings – I must have about 100 pairs now! I follow the Formula 1, and have been to 3 races across the world. I love travelling and exploring new places, I’ve been as far as Australia which was amazing! And everywhere I go, I try and have an ice cream, I’ve even got a hashtag! #icecreamsaroundtheworld    I play the Violin and play in the Dundee Symphony Orchestra which is great fun! My pronouns are she/her

I work in a small team of people that include other chemists, biologists and other scientists. We all work together to try and find new medicines to cure different diseases. As a medicinal chemist, this involves me coming up with lots of ideas to make new medicines using lots of different bits of information. I then use synthetic organic chemistry to make these molecules. We can then get the biologist to test them to see if they work, and we use this information to help us make the what we make better. I really enjoy the problem solving aspect of medicinal chemistry, its really exciting when you get a break through and make something that works!

I work mostly in a chemistry lab, where I work in a fumehood to keep us safe. There are lots of other chemists around in the lab, so its really sociable. Generally I spend most of my day putting reactions on and then getting them clean, we have to make sure we have clean material to give to the biologist. I use lots of different machines to help with this, which mean I can do lots of different things at once! I record all the details of my experiments so that we have a record in case anyone else needs to repeat what I’ve done in the future. My job is basically like cooking, I just don’t get to eat what I’ve made!!

I start work at about 8.45 each day (I’m not an early morning person!). I would then head in to the lab, to check on the experiments I had put on the day before. We use a magnetic stirrer hotplate to heat and stir our reactions. Its like a fancy hob really, and it means we don’t have to manually stir our reactions. I use a machine called an LCMS to look at my reaction to see if its worked. If it has, great! I would then normally try and get the product out of the reaction mixture. We normally do our reactions in a liquid, or solvent, we don’t want this at the end as we like to try and make white solids. So often I will use a rotary evaporator to remove the solvent. This machine has a vacuum which lowers the boiling point of the liquid and makes it easier to get rid of. Once we have a solid, its not normally clean, so I have to clean, or purify, it. To do this we use a technique called column chromatography. This uses the difference in time taken for different molecules to move through a column. This is similar to when you dot black ink on to a bit of paper and put the end in water, the different colours separate out because they move up the paper at a different speed. We can then collect our clean product and using the rotary evaporator again remove the liquid (solvent). I can check if I’ve made the right thing using an NMR machine, this is like a MRI scanner that you get in hospitals but instead of looking at people it looks at tiny molecules. If we have made the right thing we can give it to the biologist to test or we can do another experiment on it. Often we have to do lots of little reactions to make one medicine molecule. I put my experiments on at the end of the day, this involves weighing solids, and measuring out liquids. Then I can check they are safe and leave them to work overnight, so I’m even doing chemistry while I’m sleeping!