Profile

I originally come from Anglesey in North Wales where I lived until I left to go to University in Liverpool. I studied Biology and became very interested in microbes and in particular viruses, so when I finished my degree I moved to Sheffield to do a PhD in virology. I also worked in the NHS as a clinical scientist for a few years before joining the University of Manchester as a lecturer where I have spent most of my career.

I met my husband Mark on my first day at University in Liverpool and we have now been married for a long time! I have 4 children, my oldest son is now all grown up and works as a software engineer in London. Mark and I decided to start fostering children when our oldest son left home and we became foster parents for 3 wonderful children who we then adopted and who are now all teenagers. I am very interested in the welfare of children in care and do some work in my spare time for a local adoption agency.

I have two cockapoo dogs, who are brothers one is very calm and good and the other one is a little bit crazy but we love them both! We enjoy going for walks with them in the nearby countryside, they like to chase squirrels but never catch them.

My other obsession is house renovation, I am really interested in houses from the Edwardian and Victorian era and enjoy watching any “housey” programmes on TV.

The first real research I was involved in was during my PhD when I worked on the human papilloma viruses that cause cancer of the cervix and discovered that certain chemicals can stop the immune system from working and allow the viruses to infect people more easily. After that I moved to Manchester to work for the NHS and did some research with people who had the blood disorder called haemophilia, who sadly had became infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) because they were given contaminated blood. Next I went to work for the University of Manchester where I have spent most of my career. My research is now mostly concerned with virus infections that occur during pregnancy and can damage the unborn baby. In particular I am interested in a virus called cytomegalovirus which is related to the herpes viruses that cause cold sores. This virus doesn’t usually cause any symptoms in people who are healthy and have good immune systems, but it can get passed from a pregnant woman, who may not even know she is infected with it, into her unborn baby and occasionally when this happens the baby’s brain can be damaged by the virus, or more commonly it can affect the baby’s ears causing deafness. My research looks at why most of the time a baby who gets infected is born perfectly healthy with no effects from the virus but around 1 in 10 of infected babies do have damage caused by the virus. My research team is looking at the proteins on the outside of the virus to see whether some viruses have mutations that make them more likely to cause damage. If we can show that this is the case we would be able to develop drugs and vaccines that would help to prevent this damage.

An important part of my work is teaching students about viruses and I run a Masters of Science course, in Medical and Molecular Virology which is a course students can take when they finish their undergraduate degree and want to specialise in virology.

My work day doesn’t have any set pattern, I am lucky in being able to decide what I need to do and when to do it. I love virology and so it doesn’t really feel like work!

Once I’ve had my cup of tea and checked through any emails, I’ll usually go into the lab and check on my cells or any experiments I may have set up. Because viruses are not alive they can only be grown inside living cells so that they can use the cell’s systems to copy their genomes and make new viral proteins. For this reason a virologist doing research needs to be really good at growing cultures of cells and keeping them alive. It is a little bit like gardening!

Often my day will include quite a lot of meetings, usually on zoom these days. The meetings might be with my research students discussing their latest results and what they will do next. Sometimes that involves me going to the lab with them to look at some of their experiments, especially if it has given an unexpected result.

Or it may be with one of my MSc students about some difficulty they are having or about some part of the course they are having trouble understanding. As a result of COVID most of the lectures I give are now recorded so that students can watch them on-line, but I meet face-face with the students a few times a week to discuss what is in the lectures and provide any extra information they might need.

I usually bring some soup or a salad to have for lunch and eat at my desk while answering more emails.

Reading is a really important part of my job. It is essential to keep up with other people’s work and any new developments in my area of virology, so I try to spend at least an hour a day just reading.

If the department is quiet it is a good opportunity to catch up on some writing, this may be a report providing advice on the pandemic, or an application to apply for some funds to do a particular piece of research, or a research paper I am writing about our own research, or it may be a review of someone else’s research paper. Science works on a system called “peer review” which means that when someone writes about the results of their research and sends it into a journal it is sent to other scientists working on similar topics who read and review it and comment on it to say if they think it is good enough to be published, or how it could be made better.

Other things that happen during my day are meetings with various people about university business, or with local groups about COVID or with colleagues in the university or hospitals about projects we are working on or planning.

I typically leave work around 6pm and try to make sure my evenings are a balance of spending time with my family and maybe doing just a little bit more work.