Career history 2012-2015: Project Technician. University of Southampton, UK. Health protection agency, Salisbury, UK. Academic qualifications BSc. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. After completing my undergraduate degree in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I worked at the health protection agency in Salisbury developing a microarray tool to speed up diagnosis of bacterial and viral infections. I then moved to Southampton to carry out postgraduate research study antimicrobial tolerance in bacterial biofilms. After gaining my PhD, I have continued working at Southampton, carrying out contracted microbiology work for external companies as part of the Environmental Healthcare Unit Consultancy service.

The Environmental Healthcare Unit is run by Prof. Bill Keevil. It undertakes fundamental microbiology research projects for government, research councils and industry, and also provides a microbiology consultancy service to small private companies. The work I carry out for this service incorporates a wide range of organisms and techniques, from detecting the presence of bacteria and biofilms using PNA-FISH and epifluorescence microscopy, to antimicrobial killing work. We test not only the effect the antimicrobial agent has on decreasing culturable bacteria, but also use a range of techniques to determine the presence of viable but non-culturable cells (VBNCs), which may not be detected using standard antimicrobial killing assays.