Profile

At the moment I’m a 1st year PhD student – that means I have finished my 1st degree and am starting another one for 3 years! My research area is tissue engineering – not tissues as in Kleenex, but a really exciting area of medical science with some gory pictures at times…

Most tissue engineering research looks at growing or improving parts of the body. I’m hoping to find a new way of growing bones outside of the body, which could actually be implanted in people in the future – sometimes the body’s natural bone is damaged or injured, so needs replacing, just like a patch on your jeans when they get a hole. In the body however, new bone will eventually grow over the patch, and it will be living tissue again (That’s right – did you know bone is alive?)

I have an office that I share with other medical engineering PhD students, so I start my day in there – normally with a morning snack! I don’t have lessons or lectures, so I decide what I want to do that day in the morning. As I started my PhD in October, I am still finding out new things about my topic – there is a lot of information to learn, and it’s a mixture of physics, biology and engineering. So I need to be feeling pretty awake to take it all in! The best way to find out new information is by reading journal papers – these are written by scientists after they have finished an experiment, just like you write up experiments in school. As I am trying to research something that nobody has researched before, I can’t look everything up in a textbook, and have to search the internet for useful papers.

I am also starting to design my experiments, and organise the equipment and materials I will need. I am going to be using ultrasound – an inaudible sound wave. You may have come across this if you have younger brothers or sisters, as it is used to show what a baby looks like while it is still inside it’s mother’s womb. I need to learn how to use this equipment, so I am spending time in our laboratories playing with all the settings!