Profile

I am scientist at Oxford University. I live with my boyfriend and we enjoy cooking meals from cuisines all around the world together! My favourite fast food is KFC popcorn chicken. I watch way too many hair/make-up videos on YouTube… I like to stay fit, walking/hiking and try to practice yoga every day. My ultimate role-model is David Attenborough. My pronouns are she/her.

I work on the response of tiny micro-organisms in the ocean, called plankton, respond to schemes which aim to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and store it in the ocean. This would help us to combat climate change and global warming, as well as helping to reverse the damaging process of ocean acidification. A key unknown though is how plankton, which produce over 50% of the Earth’s oxygen, might respond to these proposed schemes. This is where my research comes in!

Click here to see a short video (~4 mins) produced by the website oceanCDR.net, which really nicely explains the idea of the carbon dioxide removal scheme I work on, called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement.

(1) Field work – I have done field work in Israel and get up really early to go out on a boat onto the sea, before it gets too hot (up to 40 degrees celsius at 2pm!) I collect plankton by towing big nets which only have very tiny holes in them behind the boat. I then empty the collections from the nets into big buckets which I take back to the lab to grow the plankton I have collected under controlled lab conditions.

(2) Lab work – If I am working in the lab in Oxford, I get up early and get to the lab often before anyone else gets in so that I can work in peace! I switch on all the equipment I need and then I get cracking checking on the plankton that I have growing in flasks in incubators (basically just very fancy temperature-controlled fridges!).

(3) Desk work – if I have recently done a lot of field work and lab work then I will need to spend some days in front of a computer analysing the data I have produced. This involves using a lot of spreadsheets and using software to produce graphs to communicate my research clearly. I usually drink a lot of coffee while I’m doing this!!!