Profile

I am living in Carlow with my wife. We both love gardening and growing house plants. We have around 40 houseplants that include mostly air cleaners; spider plant, snake plant, Ivy, aloe vera, etc. I spend time watching Big Bang Theory on a routine basis, the humor has relaxing effect, while to calm myself, I do meditation and yoga in the morning and do some cooking.

I take responsibility to conduct the experimentation in the laboratory such as genetically manipulating the genomes of microbes and plants for enhancing their utility. As we get diseases, plants also get infected with diseases. Therefore, as plant scientists we are responsible to breed novel plant varieties with improved disease resistance that help farmers growing better crops and produce food for all.

In-vitro regeneration of plants

Students scoring potato plants for diseases

My work start with a routine walk to the lab and glasshouses to make sure if everything is in order for all team members. We take time for a lab chat about the days work, which helps us to work more efficiently. Then I observe my ongoing experiments, organise the weekly seminar and meet my line manager. After my coffee break at 1100 am, I start working in lab until lunch time. Thereafter, I collect data from ongoing experiments in glasshouse/field. I like taking pictures of my experiments as supporting evidence of my results. The day ends while I analyse the data and draw meaningful conclusions from the results obtained.

Some days, do involved communicating science to young researchers, farmers and attending scientific conferences. This gives me the opportunity to travel different countries and meet more scientists.

I would like to highlight that every day of my scientific career differs, as the work goes along. I feel that every day brings novel opportunities for me to learn and become a better scientist and a person.

“A picture is worth a thousand words”, therefore I will use the winning amount to print the images from Teagasc Vision of Research competition that will be used to disseminate our research to a wider community. These images will be used during science week events, BT-Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, and other exhibitions during our visit to different schools and colleges.

Check some of our research images:

https://horizon-magazine.eu/media/new-perspectives-bioeconomy.html

https://www.teagasc.ie/news–events/news/2017/winning-images-bioeconomy.php

Here is one of the image that recently won:

In-vitro regeneration of potato plantlets

Attend our science week event at MacDonagh Junction, Kilkenny. For more details visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/440931663198176/