Profile

I live in Bristol, and am currently working from home. I grew up in south London, near Croydon, and my extended family are also London based. I moved to Bristol in 2018 after my PhD, and really enjoy living here!

In my spare time at the moment, I am learning the ukulele, and also catch up with friends and family in the evening on Zoom. I am also a member of a group called Geolatinas. I join in with their yoga classes each week and it’s really fun!

My pronouns are she/her.

As a progamme manager, I help researchers fund their work. Some of these researchers are lecturers and professors at universities, and others are researchers who are in jobs which allow them to research after their PhDs (postdoctoral researchers). Before they get their money to fund their work, they have to send a research council an explanation of what they would like to do, and why they are suitable people to carry out the work. These applications happen in rounds. As programme managers, we send their applications to reviewers, who are experts and can figure out whether the research can be done, in the same way that a teacher checks your work and gives you feedback. A review is essentially feedback for researchers, and often helps to strengthen a study if there are ways to make even cooler than it already is.

After this, the application goes to a panel – where there are several UK researchers who are also knowledgeable in the subjects that the applications cover. The panellists rank the applications which are submitted in a round. They grades the application and decide which ones should be funded. The panels remind me of the judging and elimination phases in X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing!

Another part of my job is helping researchers who want to sail on the research cruise ships which NERC operates. I help them through the application process, and my colleague approves their applications if she thinks what they want to do will be safe.

During my PhD, I studied the chemistry of tiny plankton (called foraminifera) fossils that are 50 million years old to understand more about how they used to live and past climate change. Plankton are organisms which float with ocean currents.

Foraminifera are made up of one cell, and live in the surface waters of the ocean and are the width of a pinhead, with skeletons made from calcium carbonate (same material as chalk).  When they die, their skeletons sink to the seafloor and build up in layers. Whilst they may not look special to the naked eye, they’re actually the best storytellers I know. As foraminifera make their skeletons in the seawater they live in, they record the conditions around them, like temperature and how much ice there is on land. This is similar to how your hair and teeth might record what you ate for lunch. This is why scientists who study climate really like to use them to investigate environmental conditions in the past. We can use warm periods of time which had lots of carbon dioxide to figure out what our future might look like.