Profile

My partner and I are currently living in Montreal, Canada with our 19 month old, ball python, and crested gecko. I am originally from Stoke-on-Trent and am a proud lover of oatcakes! I enjoy spending time outdoors, especially near any kind of water, but the sea is my favourite. We even named our child after a body of water! In my spare time I like to cross-stitch, discover new music, and watch the footy.

Humans have caused large changes to carbon and nitrogen cycles since the industrial revolution. We release carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere when we burn fuels, drive cars and farm livestock, these are all greenhouse gases which make the planet warmer. We have also created lots of nitrogen pollution, especially in water, from fertiliser and human waste, which causes eutrophication and can make water unsafe to wildlife. Eutrophication is when high nutrients cause lots of growth of algae, when this algae dies oxygen is used up to break it down, and so the oxygen can become so low that fish die. I work in streams and wetlands to understand how carbon and nitrogen that enters the water is converted to other chemical forms. Sometimes this releases greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) but can reduce the amount of nitrogen pollution and prevent eutrophication. I try to understand the environmental conditions that affect carbon and nitrogen cycling, and how these will change in the future as the planet becomes hotter and has more nitrogen pollution.

My typical day is very different depending on my current task, my job involves collecting samples from the environment, measuring the carbon and nitrogen in them in the laboratory, looking at my data and seeing if there are patterns and a story. I then write this story into a paper so that I can publish for other scientists and people to read. Some days I get to do my favourite part of my job, I spend all day outside collecting samples from streams and wetlands. I take samples of water, soil, sediment and gas from places I am interested in finding out information about. Some days I go to the laboratory to see how much carbon and nitrogen is in my samples, I do this by warming up my machines and then I make solutions or gases that I know the concentration of, so that I can put these into the machine and work out the concentration of my samples. Some days I sit at my laptop and I look at my results, to do this I make graphs of the data and see if there are any statistical differences. I can then see if there are any interesting patterns and write these into a paper to be published.