When you work with proteins, you have to be creative. You will encounter problems, like proteins misbehaving, and you’ll have to come up with a solution. I am a Scottish chemist, and after studying in Edinburgh I moved to Grenoble to do my PhD in neutron macromolecular crystallography at the ILL. I also squeezed in a year in Siberia, where I worked on the polymorphs of drug-like molecules. Now I am focusing on proteins that play a role in degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinsons’. I like the fact that there are real life implications in my job.
I have joined the team in the ESRF CIBB lab at a very exciting time because we are starting to get promising results. At the moment I am purifying protein and preparing the samples for experiments on the structural biology beamlines. We will study them using the macromolecular crystallography beamlines, as well as with the cryo-electron microscope (CM01) at the ESRF. I’m looking forward to working with cryo-EM as it will be an important skill to have in my portfolio for the future.
I enjoy working at the ESRF a lot. It’s a different environment to working at a university because it feels like a real hybrid between academia and industry.