Profile

Hi! I’m Hannah and I’m 25 years old 🙂 I’m a PhD student at Durham University and I study chemistry. At home I have a dog, called Dougal, and I love taking him for a walk at the beach. I really like cooking and my favorite TV programme is the Great British Bakeoff, although nothing I bake is as good as the cakes they make!

In my work, I try to discover new drugs which could be used to treat a nasty tropical disease called leishmaniasis (said like ‘leash-man-eye-asis’). The disease is really horrible – it causes very painful skin infections (google leishmaniasis if you want to see some photos, it’s really gross) and can kill people if they don’t get proper treatment for it. We really need new medicines for leishmanaisis because the drugs doctors use to treat the disease at the moment have horrible side effects and are very expensive. Luckily we can’t get leishmaniasis in the UK, it’s mainly found in places like South America or India and you catch it by being bitten by a sandfly that transfers parasites into your body.

In my chemistry lab, I make a lot of possible drugs for the disease leishmaniasis by doing reactions. I join different chemicals together to make the drug I want, which sounds easy but sometimes making one molecule can take several weeks.

Most days I also have to look after my parasites in the biology lab. The first thing I do is to look at them under the microscope to check if they are alive – it’s like having lots of pets, as they need to be fed and at the right temperature to be happy and grow.

Once I have made a few new molecules, I test them against the parasites which cause the disease to see which work the best.