Profile

My name is Sarah, I am 25 (even though I got mistaken for a child on the bus the other day) and I live in Nottingham with my boyfriend James.  I coach a synchronised swimming team and occasionally jump back in the pool to do a bit myself since this has been my passion since I was 10.  The thing I love most about this is making up the routines – I have made routines to Disney songs, Sia, Kanye and even the theme from Fresh Prince.  3 years ago I developed a very unusual and annoying allergy to wheat with exercise (unfortunately this means I had to stop eating proper pizza, cake, pasta, KFC (!) etc rather than having an excuse not to go to the gym).  I love playing with my friend’s children and I sometimes borrow a puppy called Lenny if I fancy a doggy cuddle.  I really enjoy travelling the world and want to visit as many countries as I can.  My guilty pleasure is binge watching Netflix series in my PJ’s with a bowl of nachos.

You have probably heard of asthma.  It is a lung (and airway) disease that affects lots of people in the UK!  For most, when they have an asthma attack they struggle to catch their breath and so use an inhaler to help get their breathing back to normal.  For some people however, the inhalers don’t help them and they could become very ill.  My work uses maths and experiments with Human cells to learn about what is happening in these airways.  Using maths means that there is less use of animals in this research!  We want to find out how the airways of these people are different and use this information to find a new way to help them when inhalers don’t work!

When I have worked in the lab, my typical day involved looking after my cells! These are human airway muscle cells, that need to be given things like nutrients to keep them alive. These are given through the pink liquid or “growth medium” that you can see in one of the images below. I then used these cells in experiments where usually I would add different coloured markers to track changes under the microscope.

These experiments gave me lots of data so that now I mostly do all my work on the computer! I write long pieces of code that allows “pretend” cells to copy the behaviour that we saw in the experiments. We can then use these models to help us find out what might happen in the future or ways of stopping something happening!

I also do regular visits to schools to share this exciting work and work that is being done by others that also use maths to learn about things in medicine or biology (and even other subjects like sports, music, physics, engineering, architecture…)

Other than experiments, coding and school visits, my typical day might involve solving calculations, having meetings to discuss the next bit of work or listening to research that is being done by others.