Profile

I live in Crowthorne with my husband, Jonny, and the cat, Sabrina, who is the true master of the house!  I was born in Taiwan, but grew up in South Africa before moving to England – this has given me an eclectic mix of cultures and an accent that confuses a lot of people.

I love travelling and exploring new cultures, foods and experiences.   I enjoy reading – especially at this time when we can’t travel – as it can take transport you to faraway places in a few moments, and I like to be creative – whether drawing on the page or experimenting with new flavours while cooking.

The company I work for, Syngenta, make products for farmers to protect their crop.

In today’s world, we want to look after our environment as much as possible.  At the same time we need grow enough food to feed a growing population.  This means that we need to make the most of our farm land to grow as much food as we can from it, so we can leave as much land as possible to grow naturally.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of obstacles to growing food – if you’ve ever tried growing something you’ve probably experienced it.  Weeds, insects and fungi make growing food really tough, and even tougher when you’re trying to do it on a large scale like a farm.

So we try to make products to help protect the food that farmers are trying to grow.  At the same time we want to make sure the products we are making are safe for people, safe for the environment and work of course!  At Jealotts Hill, we focus on weeds and we have a site in Switzerland we have a site that focus on fungi and different insects.

I work in really early stage, where we’re designing these molecules.  Part of my work is measuring the different properties of these molecules and then trying to understand how they work.  I use different instruments to help me, for example, we have a Sun test that emits bright light to mimic a bright, sunny day outside and we use it to check how stable the molecule is.

We meet as a team and decide who is going to measure what, this is so it’s not the same person doing the same measurements – otherwise it could get boring!
I then set up my experiment, preparing all the things I need and getting the instruments ready.
After conducting the experiment I record my results and load them.
We are then able to use these results alongside other results from other teams and try to understand them.