Profile

I research with a Skinsuit that has been designed to recreate gravity in order to help protect the health of astronauts when they go in to space. The Skinsuit may maintain the integrity of many physiological systems and processes, and it is my job to attempt an understanding of this. I am particularly interested in how the skinsuit interacts with exercise, and any changes it may incur to our energy expenditure or muscle activity. It’s also important that we understand this, in the hopeful eventuality that the skinsuit is integrated with future space missions! It has already been sent to the International Space Station once in September 2015, and we hope for many more.

It’s hard to summarise my day to day job in one sentence as it changes all the time – which is the great thing about being a scientist! If I am running a study – which could involve asking people to exercise on a bicycle in the skinsuit – then most of my time is spent in the laboratory running the study and collecting data. Once I finish a study, most of my time is spent analysing the data that I have collected, and making sense of the numbers and creating lots of pretty graphs (or trying to anyway!). Then I think about planning the next study, which is mainly knocking heads with my supervisors and reading literature to come up with ideas of what my next study should entail, followed by lots of documentation for the ethics committee to make sure that they know that no one is going to get hurt with what I plan to do! Then there are the other random tasks, which include helping undergraduate students with their practical sessions, giving presentations both at university to my colleagues and at conferences about my work, attending seminars to constantly improve my knowledge, attend meetings with my supervisors about my progress, arrange meetings with other academics/professionals who might help me with a query/expand ideas for my research. I also spare some of my time for media engagement like articles for the BBC and TV filming for the discovery channel, and public outreach activities like this!

I have wanted to set up a YouTube channel for a while. I want to help inspire other women to enter the field of science. I have to work every day to fight and break down stereotypes that I have been faced with for my entire life to date. I find things every day that make me stop and think: Why do I still walk into a conference room full of men and very few women? Why do I only ever see men on the train tracks on the London Underground working to fix the tracks? Why I have a still never met a female pilot (which is even more surprising considering the field I work in)? If a man can do it, a woman can do it! I frequently give talks in schools about my journey, and how I got to where I am today, because it is still rare to be a female working within the space science domain (and even science in general). It’s a double edged sword; I like that it is rare, because it makes me different, and I like being different. But I also hate that it is like this, because we as women should be doing the same things as men. So like the talks I give in schools, I would like to reach out to the wider public, and hopefully help to inspire them too with a YouTube channel, where I plan to post general science tutorials, Space physiology related topics and experiments, and some personal insights and experiences too.