Profile

I live in London with my husband. I love doing all the things London has to offer, like going to the theatre and going to see live music, or just meeting up with friends in a pub. I really love eating food.

I like making all sorts of things: websites, cakes, things to put on the walls in our flat. I once made a clock out of a tiny computer and some lights. I’m learning how to knit, but it’s not going very well. I’m not very good at keeping plants alive.

Me and my husband recently had our birthdays and I accidentally bought a huge cake which would probably feed 50 people, which means we need to eat a lot of cake because there’s only two of us in the flat during lockdown!

My pronouns are she/her.

I work in the PET Centre at St Thomas’ Hospital. This sort of PET isn’t anything to do with furry animals, it stands for Positron Emission Tomography. That’s a fancy way of saying that we use tiny particles called positrons to take pictures of what’s going on inside people’s bodies. We do this by injecting a very small amount of radioactivity (called a tracer) into the person’s vein and then using a special camera to find out where the tracer went inside their body. If the person has cancer or a problem with their heart or their brain the tracer will go there and that can help the doctor work out what’s wrong with them and how to treat them.

As a physicist I have lots of different tasks to do in the department – that’s part of what makes my job fun. A big part of the job is to make sure the equipment that we use to detect the radiation inside patients is working properly and that the patients are given the right amount of tracer to get the best images. I have a role in making sure everyone is safe too, because too much exposure to radiation can be bad for you. I also help with research studies where we try out new drugs or tracers or ways of imaging patients.

One of the nicest things about my job is that there is a lot of variation in what I get up to. Most days I start at 9am and work until about 5:30pm.

Depending on what projects I am doing, I will usually spend about half the day at my desk doing work on the computer. This might be building spreadsheets or software that will be used to improve patient scans or to test equipment, working on reports and papers or putting together lectures for students. Most days I spend a bit of time in the laboratory we have in the basement, where we have a cyclotron in the lab, which is a particle accelerator (a bit like what they have at CERN but much smaller) that we use to fire particles called protons at a target to make the radioactive tracers. I work closely with the chemists and engineers who work with the cyclotron to make sure everything is working as well as it can be so that all of our patients can have the scans they need.

Sometimes I will be called to the lab or scanning suite to help when a piece of equipment breaks down or when something has gone wrong, like if someone has spilled some radioactivity or if a patient’s images look a bit funny. It can be fun to help troubleshoot and try to get things working again, if a little stressful at the time!