Profile

I live in Loughrea, Co. Galway with my wife and three children (aged 9, 6 and 4) and our dog Dexter. Loughrea is a friendly town close to Galway city, with a lake for swimming and woods for hiking and biking.

I work in Galway city, in the National University of Ireland Galway, where I have been a scientist for 15 years. Before that, I studied Science in University College Dublin, specialising in Microbiology (looking at bugs, both harmful and useful) and I also got my PhD there (looking at a bug that caused pneumonia in horses and some vulnerable people).

I love to travel, with my family and with work, and have been to Hong Kong, Australia, America, Canada, Morocco and lots of European countries too. My favourite country to visit is Italy – I love the food, the football and the history!

I love movies (particularly the Marvel superhero movies), TV (Game of Thrones, Succession, Rick and Morty, The West Wing and The Wire), music (rock and indie), football (playing and watching) and reading (my favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and Bill Bryson).

I also love doing outdoors activities with my family, and became a Scout leader a few years ago. We go on hikes and camp out a couple of times a year.

I’m a Biologist working in Galway with people from different backgrounds (Biology, Engineering, Medicine, Chemistry, Computer Science, Physics and Maths) from all over the world (UK, USA, China, India, Thailand, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Russia) on lots of different projects.

Oh, and I also work with a robot called Janus…

We bought Janus in 2010 to help us carry out more experiments much faster and more reliably than would be possible by hand. A typical experiment would involve giving some cancer cells a chemical to see if they survive.

An experiment to find new anti-cancer drugs, laid out on the deck.

Janus allows us to carry out thousands of these experiments at the same time, as “she” can quickly add very small amounts of the drugs to thousands of cells, in lots of different compartments of the same plastic dish, or “microplate”. She can then keep track of where the different drugs have been added, and tell us which drugs have killed the highest numbers of cancer cells. Then we can take those interesting drugs and do more experiments, looking at the dosage, treatment time and even drug combinations.

Microplates with 5000 cancer cells and different drugs in each well. Dark blue wells are where the drug has killed lots of the cancer cells. Result!

This type of research is called “Screening” and we can also use Janus to screen samples from the environment, such as marine samples (e.g. corals and sponges) or even spider venom, for new medicines. Then we can work with Chemists to identify and make the new compound and Clinicians to see if it could be used to treat patients safely. We can also work with Stem Cell researchers trying to find new ways of getting stem cells to repair heart tissue, bone or cartilage.

I get up around 7:30, get myself ready, then help my wife get the kids ready for school. I’m out the door at 8:50, hop on the bus at 9:00 and I’m at my desk or in the lab at 10:00.

I usually have my labwork planned a week or two in advance, so I know which project I’ll be working on. I get Janus ready for the day, running some tests to make sure she’s a happy robot, and then sterilise all surfaces, to prevent the cells becoming contaminated. If it’s a new project, I will need to do some programming to get Janus to do what we need.

I then meet with the researcher (normally a PhD student) who wants to run an experiment on Janus, get the cells and drugs they want to test, and place them on Janus’ deck area where the experiment can take place. This can take just a few minutes (she’s really quick), or if there are lots of samples, hours or even overnight while I’m at home in bed! If it takes a long time, I can just walk away and have some lunch, and if Janus needs me she can send me an email!

Once we have some results from Janus, we need to do some maths to see which is the best drug. It’s not very difficult to do, but if you have a lot of data, it can take some time. We always repeat experiments at least three times over different days, so we can be really sure of our results.

Once we are finished the labwork, the experiment is written as a research paper, with an Introduction (what we hope to find), Methods (what we did), Results (what we found) and Discussion (what it all means) sections. Hopefully, it will then get published in a Scientific Journal for other scientists to read.

I leave work at 18:00 and am home around 19:00 to spend some time with the kids or bring them to guitar or scouts, where I am a leader. I play football some evenings, or just watch TV or read.