Profile

I’m still studying my PhD and working at the university in London. My friends and I love going to see musicals and other theatre performances. My favourites so far has to be Lion King,  Book of Mormon and The Play that goes Wrong. Love eating food too, pizza, pasta, sushi, everything.

I do a lot of exercise too. I run to work once a week, currently learning a self defence martial art called Krav Maga, sometimes play tennis and go climbing with friends.

My PhD work and my research associate job are linked. I look at how sustainable or environmentally friendly a system is and design how to make it better. This is important because if something is bad for the environment, it is also bad for us, health wise. For example we don’t want to breathe in too much carbon monoxide do we?

For drugs that are made using living cells, I assess everything that goes into making it and out, how are those things are made, what the output does to our environment and see what is the accumulate environmental it has. We can then see which part of production is bad for the environment and change it.

We have a lot of plastic waste in our modern day life. I research into designing out plastic waste. What we want to do is take plastic rubbish and using it to make plastic or other products. Again, I am looking at how environmentally friend what we currently do is before suggesting change.

I work with a whole team of people who are experts in different areas trying to come up with a solution into ensure better use of plastic, make plastic more recyclable and ensure the technologies used are optimal.

My work is different every day, I can be in a group meeting to discuss one project all day and be working on different bits of different projects on another day. Our projects include looking at plastic in fashion – how can we recycle clothes more; different ways of recycling – mechanical versus chemical recycling and enzyme recycling, sustainability of coffee cups, plastic in construct and many more.

I am still doing writing up my PhD work on how environmentally biological drug manufacture and will continue to do so until September.

We do a lot of public engagement as part of the UCL Plastic Waste Innovation Hub. On 3rd June we are doing a school assembly on Plastic Waste and Climate Change, on 5th June we will be speaking at Cheltenham Science festival.

I want to use the money to generate more resources to teach children what they can do to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic. There are a lot of misconception on plastic as well, we want people to know that plastic is not totally evil, we just need to improve the system in which it is use and don’t over use it.