Profile

I was born in Sunderland which is where I also went to school. I loved living close to the beach and spent a lot of my weekends there, especially during the summer holidays.

I still love going for walks along the coast and spend my weekends finding cool local places to visit. I really love going to see waterfalls and visiting the rockpools at Bamburgh Castle.

I like to try new things and because I love being at the beach I recently started scuba diving with my friends which was super scary at first but really fun to see all of the colourful fish.

scuba diving in Egypt

My work as a polar scientist is super varied. My work means I get to travel a lot to remote parts of the Arctic, sometimes we go by ship and sometimes by helicopter.

I work on lots of different kinds of science projects:

I worked on a mapping projects where I draw what we see in the land in front of glaciers in Svalbard. Here we got to travel by boat to loads of different glaciers.

Svalbard sampling

I also worked on collecting sediment samples from underneath and in front of glaciers in Svalbard to see what microbes are living there. Lots of the microbes we found have never been detected before and doing this kind of work helps to build a global database of species.

Svalbard sampling

I love working on ships and getting to see all of the cool wildlife and nature. Last year I was on a cruise around the northwest passage, a famous trading route which was eventually discovered after lots of unsuccessful expeditions, by the McClure Arctic Expedition in 1850. Here we were sampling the air to see if the microbes in the air are different in the Arctic compared to other parts of the world.

Canada sampling

While onboard we got to see northern lights and polar bears!

Northern lights

Polar bears in Canada

Sometimes fieldwork is less glamorous and this year I spent some time in the spring camping at the Greenland Ice Sheet where we had no toilets and ate lots of dried foods (and M&Ms)… I was very happy to get back to the nearest town to have a shower and eat fresh food.

This was the coldest place I have ever visited and one night it got as cold as -20 degrees C!

Greenland sampling

Greenland team

The hard work really starts when we get back to the laboratory at the university. Here we have to sort out our samples and make sure they are stored properly in fridges and freezers. I can then start analysing them for things like DNA/RNA (to see what microbes are there), major chemical ions like calcium and sodium (to see how the glacier is able to crush minerals out of rocks), and using microscopes to count bacteria cells.