Profile

I am originally from Poland but I’ve been in the UK for over 10 years now. I used to live in Edinburgh where I finished University. I liked living in Scotland despite the cold and windy weather. I especially liked the accent, the kilts and the sheep walking everywhere… oh and haggis, of course!

In 2018 I started my current job for which I had to move down to Cambridge. I miss Scotland very much but at least Cambridge is flat, more sunny and I get to cycle a lot. And it’s a great place for meeting other scientists who work on some very cool projects!

When I’m not working I like to go out and see my family or friends. I’m a foodie so I also like to cook and bake or maybe go to a restaurant and try something new. I play the violin and I actually have a few students that I teach over the weekends – I love music and I love to teach so I enjoy doing that very much! Other things I do include learning Italian, a little bit of embroidery, reading books, watching Netflix and solving jigsaw puzzles.

My first degree was in chemistry and I was lucky enough to study for a year in Australia where I met some lovely people and many interesting plants and animals. My favourite was a yellow-crested cockatoo – I think it’s the coolest bird on Earth!

For my PhD I studied a very unusual type of sugar found in the sea cucumbers. Sea cucumbers are very popular in South-East Asia where people eat them and make all sorts of healthcare and beauty products from them. I was interested to find out more about the properties of this sugar and how other molecules in our body interact with it.

Here is what a sea cucumber dinner looks like:

I also did practical experience in labs in Australia and UK, working on a few interesting research projects. My favourite project was with the Australian Museum where I worked on a new forensic DNA test to help to stop smugglers of rhino horns in Vietnam. It was really cool to use science to help to reduce wildlife crime around the world.

In my current work I also use DNA tests but for a very different purpose – I try to determine if a patient has cancer and what type of cancer exactly it is. This is not always an easy job as there are many cancers that are very similar to each other and sometimes it can be very hard to tell them apart. Once we have results for our tests, we send them to doctors and they can use them to make decisions about how to treat the patient. Sometimes we get samples from patients who are already taking medications to see how well they’re doing. We can look at how many cells still have changes in their DNA and from that say if the patient is getting better or worse and help the doctor decide if maybe a different kind of medication should be used to make them better. We do many different kind of tests and it is very interesting to learn about them all. In some of them we use fluorescent probes to look for specific genes under the microscope and in some we get to ‘read’ the patient’s DNA sequence to look for very small changes.

This is what fluorescent DNA labels look under a microscope:

And this is what your DNA sequence may look like if we put it in our machine. It’s made up of 4 building blocks (like 4 different lego pieces) and we use 4 letters (A,C,G and T) to tell them apart.