Profile

I live in Liverpool with 3 girls from my office. I was a university drop out (Civil Engineering), then I joined the Royal Marines and was later discharged, then I went back to university (Maths). I Lived in the USA for a year while studying at university. I try and get into the swimming pool every morning if I can and like to go hill walking during the summer. My real passion is in football, I play in a Saturday league, and if I wasn’t a scientist I would be a greens keeper at a stadium.

I look at range expansions and biological invasions, which is a fancy way of saying I look at how species move with their environment. More specifically I look at how different varieties of the same species affect these processes.I use mathematical equations and computers to run experiments to find the answers to my scientific questions. Sometimes collected data is used, but in my field this is hard to come by, so we use existing knowledge to build assumptions. In a nutshell, I am a theoretical biologist.

I try to start my day by swimming if I can, it sets me up for work! I begin by dealing with all the days admin stuff, answering emails, etc. Then I’ll read scientific documents within my field of research to see if there’s anything new and exciting happening. I’ll then usually break for coffee before starting on calculations for whatever I’m working on.  I break for lunch at about 1pm and have another break at 3pm before checking the news and leaving at 6pm.

If I’m not doing sums, I’m often setting up experiments on the computer to test if my results from the experiments match those from the calculations. This usually means programming my own code to solve the calculations I’ve done by hand, this is always tricky.