Profile

I live in Hull in the north east of England, but I grew up in Portsmouth (down south) and when I was 16 I moved further south, to Australia, and stayed there for 10 years – my accent is very confused! My favourite food is a Thai dish, pad see ew, but I’m a terrible cook so I get takeaway a bit too often. My top movie is Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit because there’s so much detail in every shot and I spot something new everytime I watch it (and I’m a big fan of cheese).

I moved to Hull from Australia in 2016 to take on a job as a lecturer of Clinical Anatomy at the Hull York Medical School. I’ve always been fascinated by anatomy and how 1000s of structures come together to make a person.

My main role is to teach on our MSc in Clinical Anatomy (and Education) programmes. Our students have the chance to dissect the whole body over the course of the year – this is really important for their education because they get to see actual anatomy and not just what you see in textbooks and on plastic models.

^ A typical teaching session with my MSc students. In this photo, we’re looking at a model of the spinal cord and its nerves.

Everyone is unique and no body looks like what is shown in the textbooks – we’ve all got something different in our anatomy. This can be anything from a missing muscle, an extra bone, an artery that takes an unusual route, all the way to having a horseshoe kidney!

^ A horseshoe kidney – this is a variation that happens in foetal development. The two kidneys are united in the middle of the body making one big, horseshoe-shaped kidney

(image credit: Prosyannikov [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons)

On a typical teaching day, I’ll spend the morning in the dissection lab with the Masters students exploring the anatomy region of the week (e.g. the heart, or the knee). They work in small groups (usually 4 per cadaver) and work through a set of dissection tasks so that they can view the anatomy of the structure from the skin all the way down to the bone.

If I’m not teaching the MSc students, then I’m working with the medical students. They don’t dissect but instead look at specimens that we prepared in advance so that they understand where everything is in the body. This means that when they become doctors, they know exactly where to look and what to expect to find in their patients. Understanding what normal anatomy looks like will help them to reach a diagnosis when something has gone wrong, and then they can work to make it better or manage the problem.

When I’m not teaching (or doing admin tasks), I’m planning my next science communication event. I started giving public talks in 2017 when I competed in FameLab and got to the UK final – for this event I spoke about the language of anatomy and how the words may look complicated or confusing at first but that it’s not so difficult to learn, especially when there’s an interesting story to be told The Language of Anatomy – FameLab 2017 UK Final

Since then I’ve created my own event series, Anatomy Nights. At these talks, anatomists go to their local pub or bar, talk about a particular organ, and then dissect an animal organ to show all its inner workings. Our next event is on Valentine’s Day and we’ll be talking about the heart!

I’ve also run events and demos for the British Science Festival, Pint of Science, Shambala Festival, TEDx (Heart Waves | Kat Sanders | TEDxHull), Hull Science Festival, Cafe Scientifique, FameLab Academy, the British Science Association Hull branch, and now the Christmas Lectures!