Christy – Graduate Research Assistant (CRISPR)

What is your role at MRC Harwell?

I work as a Graduate Research Assistant within the CRISPR lab within the Molecular and Cellular Biology group. In a typical day, a big part of my job is to genotype and validate genetically modified animals. As a group, we interact with research groups around the country to produce mouse models with certain mutations depending on the project specification.

What is your background? Did you see yourself doing this kind of job when you were younger?

When I was in school, I was vaguely interested in science. I went to college and did physics and maths mechanics, which I really didn’t get on with at all.

I left college and went and got myself a job in catering and I was working as chef for a few years before going back to college. There was a course – an access to biomedical science course at my local college in Brighton – which I studied for a year and then went off to university to study for my biomedical science undergraduate degree.

I then went and did my Master’s in personalised medicine and medical genetics. My Master’s really solidified my interest in those subjects. It was always something that I really wanted to go back to but I ended up getting a job in the NHS as a biomedical scientist but I didn’t really get on with the clinical environment.

I always felt a pull to go back to research and to go back to these gene editing technologies, which I found so interesting.

What have you enjoyed most about being on the Graduate Programme?

I guess the most valuable thing that I’ve learned during this job is the kind of research process. So a big part of what I’ve been doing over the last year is the validation of a new machine. That process of taking a new sort of unknown machine, validating it, writing a procedure and then bringing it into routine use is definitely something that’s very valuable.

I think the thing that will make the biggest impact on my career going forward is partly the techniques that I’ve learned along the course of doing this graduate scheme. But mostly I think it’s being within an environment with other people who are interested in the stuff that I’m interested in.

Being able to talk to other people about ideas surrounding CRISPR and mouse models more generally has been very, very insightful. And this is something that is very hard to get – it’s a type of training that is very hard to get outside of a research environment.

What do you want to do next?

I think this placement has definitely changed my viewpoint on the next steps in my career. The further study route is definitely sort of more appealing to me now. I’ve seen a few of the sort of other professionals within the lab that have done PhDs talk how it is quite an important part of the process of developing yourself as a researcher, and that’s definitely something I would want to continue to do.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Outside of work I juggle being a new dad with my love of board games and playing ukulele.

Christy joined the MLC through our Graduate Development Programme. You can find out more about the programme as well as interviews with our other graduates on our Graduate Development Programme page.