Profile

I’m a medical doctor – I went to medical school, work in a hospital, treat sick patients….. but I spend most of my time trying to come up with better ways of treating the diseases I look after.

I grew up in a small town in Northern Ireland (Ballyclare) before going to Oxford University for preclinical medicine. I then studied clinical medicine in Edinburgh University and worked both there and in London as a doctor before going to Cambridge University for my PhD. I’m still there now, working in the Department of Medicine.

I also have 3 small kids so have to balance science, medicine and life, too (not always easy!) and have worked with industry (drug companies), University admissions (doing interviews) and helped set up a company to help take new technology into hospitals, too.

I’m interested in diseases where the immune system doesn’t do what it should. To work properly your immune system needs to be able to fight off any infection that exists or that might ever exist. As if that wasn’t enough, it has to do this without damaging your own body.

The patients I look after have immune diseases where their immune system either doesn’t work well enough or attacks things it shouldn’t (giving diseases like diabetes or multiple sclerosis). I also look after patients who have had organs transplanted in because theirs don’t work well enough (kidneys, for example).

Most of my work takes place in the laboratory, though, trying to improve the way we treat immune diseases. I work on what is often called ‘big data’ – technology has advanced to let us make many thousands of measurements at once where we used to spend ages measuring one thing at a time. I measure many things at once in patients with a range of immune diseases including diabetes, transplantation, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. The measurements include different genes or the products of those genes, including messages and proteins. Its not unusual to get millions of measurements in one go from many people – and this might only take an afternoon!

Increasingly, the difficult bit is working out what all that information means. I use computer programmes and types of machine learning to pick out interesting patterns in all that data and try to work out what it means. We have used these patterns to develop tests for patients – to predict if their disease is going to get worse – and are using it to develop new treatments, too.

The benefit of measuring everything is that we aren’t limited to thinking about what we already know – we can find truly new things we never suspected would be there. It can be genuinely exciting to uncover something for the first time that no-one else has ever seen…..

I start the day with an unhealthy number of cups of coffee…

…then get started. Most days are different – which is unusual in a job. I might spend time analysing new data, writing papers or researching new ways to work. This means a lot of time spent on my computer and science involves an increasing amount of ‘dry work’ – a side effect of generating lots of data quickly is that you spend more time analysing, something that has changed massively and continues to change, too.

More traditional experiments still form an important part of the lab, too. We use data to come up with ideas, then test them using immune cells from patients or healthy volunteers that are grown in a dish. We might be testing how they respond to a new treatment, for example.

I spend quite a bit of time having meetings, too, discussing results with other scientists. Being able to communicate and work with other people is hugely important.

I also collaborate and work closely with other research groups around the world. I didn’t expect travel to feature in a scientific career but it really does. Meeting with other groups and presenting work features at some point in most weeks.