What is your role at LSHTM?
I am a final year PhD student in the department of Disease Control, supervised by Prof James Logan. I teach on a variety of statistics and entomology modules and am currently a student representative for ITD.

Tell us a bit about a project that you are currently working on?
I am based at LSHTM where I aim to understand the role of the skin microbiome in human attractiveness to Anopheles mosquitoes. To date, I have shown there are differences in the skin microbiome between people who are poorly- and highly- attractive to mosquitoes, which are associated with volatiles in our body odour. If you are like me and get bitten a lot, you can at least partly blame the bacteria on your skin! I am continuing to investigate the skin microbiome and attractiveness to mosquitoes in another cohort and planning to compare the oral microbiome between children infected with malaria compared to controls. 

When and how did you start working on malaria?
I began working on malaria when I started my PhD working with Anopheles mosquitoes back in 2019.

Where are you from?
I am from a small village south of Bristol (it has an alpaca farm but that’s about it).

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I wanted to be a vet. I ended up going to Liverpool for a BSc in Biological Science, I was fascinated by the vector control and global health lectures I took at LSTM so made the swap to mosquitoes and now mostly bacteria!

What’s your favourite place?
The countryside, I love escaping from the hustle of central London when I can.

‘When I’m not working, I am…’
Exploring the food and cocktail bars of south London, travelling to new places or visiting friends around the UK!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Whenever science is not working right at first it builds resilience and makes you a better scientist, that has kept me going throughout the PhD journey.