Profile

My name is Paul and my family are all Irish but I was born and grew up in (Greater) London. I live in Leeds now with my wife, who I met at University, and son, who is nearly 3. He’s a cheeky train-obsessed toddler and there’s lots of time spent at the park, playing with trains, Duplo and cars, and running about like a chimp. When we get the chance, my wife and I watch stuff like Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, and the Great British Bake Off. We also occasionally get out to the cinema, usually to see the next Marvel film, and I think Infinity War might be my favourite movie ever. I don’t get as much time to play on the Xbox as I used to, but I occasionally get stuck into Dark Souls 3 or play Overcooked! or Gears of War with my wife. I play the Nintendo Switch on the train and having been playing Super Smash Bros as Link for 20 years! I’m also excited to see my son getting into Mario, just like I just to play with my Grandad and Uncle.

When I was faced with choosing A Level subjects as I got to the end of year 11, I realised that I had to pick Biology and Chemistry over English and History, though I enjoyed them just as much. I also did Classical Civilisations, which is brilliant if your school offers it, AS Maths (which I confess I never enjoyed at school but appreciate it a lot more now), and AS Critical Thinking, which is also cool if you get the chance to take it.

I knew pretty early on that I wanted to go to the University of York – I’d been to York on a primary school trip and thought it was awesome. I initially wanted to do Forensic Science, but York didn’t offer it so I decided to do Biochemistry instead and keep my options a bit more open. I met my wife on our first day, so definitely a good shout!

I really enjoyed studying Biochemistry and thought it would be fun to teach it to school students, so I stayed at York to do teacher training. This was great fun, if very hard work, and I followed it up by working as a teacher for a bit. This was even harder work – much respect to any teachers reading this! It’s also brilliant, but I really missed being in the lab so I left and worked in a hospital lab for a few months.

I then started a PhD at the Hull York Medical School. I’d never considered working on egg cells and embryos before, thinking developmental biology was somehow a bit superficial and dull. However the project was very biochemistry focussed – enzymes and chemical reactions releasing enough energy to build a person (or actually a cow in this case), which I thought was pretty cool. Studying this was brilliant and I ended up meeting lots of great scientists and finding out loads of new stuff. I followed this by moving to Leeds, where I still get to work with egg cell and embryos.

When I’m not doing science, I’m usually spending time with my wife and son.

During my PhD I worked mainly on preimplantation embryos, which are little balls of cells, starting from one fertilised oocyte and going up to around 200 in a cow blastocyst on day 7. Human embryos develop a bit faster, but cow is a pretty good comparison (or ‘model’) so the new data are usually useful for understanding human embryos too. I also got to work with stem cells, which was pretty awesome. Although I worked in the lab and just with those early embryos, I found out lots of new data that was relevant to the whole body. I did a lot of work on fat metabolism, and contributed to a growing idea in science that the fat stores inside an egg cell is hugely important to correct egg and embryo development, and can even impact adult life.

I followed my PhD by moving to Leeds, where I’ve been working with sheep egg cells. Egg cells are mostly stored in the ovary as very tiny groups of cells called primordial follicles. We extract these follicles from sheep tissue collected from an abattoir – the sheep are destined to be lamb burgers and mince in ASDA, and the reproductive tissue is perfectly safe, but not eaten. I quite like the fact that we are able to use this tissue that would otherwise be wasted, though I wouldn’t recommend visiting the abattoir to everybody! We then use the follicles and egg cells for experiments looking into metabolism and genetics during the life cycle from the ‘primordial’ egg to the fully grown egg that is eventually released from the ovary with the potential to form a new life. It’s fascinating stuff!

I then got the chance to work with a team of engineers. Rather than planes or engines or anything else large-scale, my colleagues are designing and making tiny devices to grow embryos in. I get to test  out how well mouse and cow embryos grow in them and do lots of experiments to compare the embryos from the new devices and traditional culture methods. The overall aim is to improve embryo culture for animals and humans.

I usually head straight to the lab to check on my egg cells and early embryos, which I grow for about 7 days in little petri dishes. I use microscopes to look at them but have to be quick as they are very sensitive and don’t like being out of the incubator! I’ll then carry out an experiment, usually using microscopes and other bits of equipment to find out how much of specific nutrients the eggs/embryos are using. I might also label the embryos with different coloured dyes to work out how many cells there are, whether they are alive or not, and how active they are in terms of metabolism. I’ll then spend a bit of time checking emails, reading to see what other scientists have been up to and writing up experiments to publish myself. I’ll also usually find time for a coffee with some of my colleagues and if I’m lucky, some cake!