Profile

I’m a PhD student student studying microbiology. What that means is after I finished my primary degree at Cork Institute of Technology I applied for a PhD position with the APC Microbiome Institute, UCC and Teagasc. It means I’m spending another four years studying instead of getting a job straight away. My PhD topic is really interesting and it keeps me really busy but I get to do some cutting edge scientific research that nobody has tried before.

Microbiology is defined as ‘a branch of biology dealing especially with microscopic forms of life’. Like bacteria, protozoans, viruses, and fungi. We know a lot about good bacteria (like in your probiotic drinks) and bad bacteria (the kinds that can make us sick) but we don’t know as much about the other things that can live inside our digestive systems, so I’m hoping to figure out what some of the other things do.

Every day is different for me, which is why I love my job 🙂 I’m working on a lot of different projects at the moment so one day I could be working with DNA  and the next day I could be growing things on agar plates in the lab. Then some days I might not be in the lab at all, for those days I might read research papers or process data and the results of my experiments on my computer.

Where I work some of us work with things like bacteria that can possibly make you sick. So you need a special kind of laboratory, lots of training and vaccines (and we have to be super careful while we work). This means that finding things that are safe to take to schools to show people about what we do can be hard. I’d like to buy some safe props that I (and other people that I work with) can take to outreach events and schools. Things I can pass around the class to make it interactive and give as prizes for asking awesome questions, like Giant microbes plush toys.