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I moved to Cambridge last year to work at one of the leading institutes in the world for decoding DNA, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Here at the Sanger Institute there are both large sequencing machines that read the DNA and huge computers called cluster computers that can help us make sense of the information the sequencers give us. One of the cluster computers I use has the same power as over 100 normal computers!

The sequencing army!

There are thousands of different projects happening here  and I work on one called the Global pneumococcal Sequencing project (GPS), there is a video online explaining a little more about it http://news.emory.edu/stories/2013/03/video_pnemonia_genome/. This project looks at a bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae, or pneumococcus for short, which can cause meningitis and pneumonia. There are vaccines for it but there are nearly 100 different types of the pneumococcus and the vaccines can only target up to 13 at the moment. What we need to do is look for which ones are becoming more common and try to understand why. We can ask questions like…

Were they around before we started vaccinating? Did the same types become more common in different parts of the world? Do these types have antibiotic resistance genes?

All this information helps other scientists understand why the changes we see happen so that we can predict them in the future and to help them decide how to design new vaccines that will do an even better job.

The GPS team is based in six locations around the world (UK, USA, Malawi, South Africa and The Gambia). This is us all together at a meeting in India.

I work normal 9-5 hours 5 days a week, I get the shuttle bus to work and back but sometimes I try to cycle the 10 miles from my home to the campus to try and stay fit!

Today I was preparing to give a presentation to give to the rest of my team on what I have been working on since I started here 6 months ago. I used to be quite nervous talking in public but now I quite enjoy it, it takes a bit of practice. I’ve even put in cartoons and jokes to make it less boring.

I also checked the progress of a computing job that I started two days ago, but the job is such a big one it still hadn’t finished. The job is using the DNA sequences of 500 of the bacteria I study to make a sort of family tree and see how all of them are related, when I have finished this diagram I can include it in a scientific article I am writing. This way the information I have learned can be spread around the world. Sharing knowledge, ideas and discussing them with others helps us progress in science.

A small part of our supercomputer….

But I work in amazing workplace not just because of the science but because I can look out the window to the fields and lake, I can wander around them to stretch my legs and I can join in sports during my lunch break, I do yoga on a Wednesday but there is also a gym 🙂

At the end of my day I switch my computer off every night so that I don’t waste energy, it all adds up and I like to try to save the planet 🙂

My work place…