Profile

When I’m not working as a scientist, I am really into horseriding and started riding lessons at the age of 4! I have a big brown and white horse named Rose and we have lots of adventures together, sometimes to the beach close to where we live. I also enjoy motorsport activities e.g. driving sports cars on various racetracks around the UK and Europe. At university I was president of the motorsports club and raced for the UWE team at the British Universities Karting Championship! Last year I experienced my first skydive which was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and I recommend everybody tries it at least once! My favourite ice cream flavour is cherry. My favourite planet is Neptune.

Working with scientists at universities and research institutions all over Europe, I help the scientists design and plan experiments ready to go to space onto the International Space Station. Some of the experiments are on board and use the help of the astronauts to get them set up and running but some are also cleverly designed automatic experiments and some even go on the outside of the space station. The reason some go outside is that astrobiology research looks into the limits of life and the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the universe. By exposing biological samples to full space conditions e.g. space temperatures, pressure and radiation, we can get an idea of the limits of life as we know it in space, and our best indications of what could exist out there!

Depending on the weather, I’ll ride my bicycle or drive to the office and typically start the working day with catching up on emails. This can range from answering requests from our developers for information on the biology need of projects so that they can build hardware that perfectly matches what we need or responding to media enquiries about what we have in the planning pipeline in terms of sending experiments off for testing or to the launch pad! I’ll get invitations to team meetings and international conferences so I spend a lot of time preparing talks for both of these. Sometimes I hop on a train or plane and visit scientists that may be having problems with experiments and work together with them to come up with good solutions. Before we send experiments to space we make sure that we test everything to minimise our chances of things going wrong (once in space it is usually no going back for making any changes) so we get everything running perfectly smoothly on ground before sending it to space. Think of it like hopping on a bicycle and speeding down a hill, only to find out that the brakes don’t work at the end of the hill! This could have a really bad result, so we want to avoid that.