Dashboard – Orange Zone

Education:

GCSEs – Woking High School
A-levels – Farnborough Sixth Form College
Integrated Masters – University College London (UCL)
PhD – St George’s, University of London
Qualifications:

11 GCSEs – 7 A*s, 3 As, 1 B
3 A-Leves – Human Biology (A*), Chemistry (A*), Maths (A)
MSci – Cellular Biology (1st)
PhD – Ongoing
Work History:

2018 – Laboratory Research Assistant – The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

2019 – Marine Research Assistant – Operation Wallacea
2020 – Medical Laboratory Assistant – Eurofins
Current Job:

PhD – St George’s Hospital / The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

About Me:

I’ve just begun my PhD in medical biology, studying how bacteria become resistant to medicine. I’ve been in London for 5 years and love it!
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I live in green, green Surrey with my family, I design clothes in my spare time and love to cook (I’m a vegetarian for the planet!)

I’ve got a cat called Pepper. He’s enormous.
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Sometimes when we treat germs with medicine, the medicine doesn’t work. I’m trying to figure out how the germs (bacteria) stop the medicine (antibiotics) from working, and what we can do about it.

Bacteria can do this crazy thing called horizontal gene transfer. What happens is, they’re able to give pieces of DNA to each other. How this happens is super well understood in E. coli and other bacteria, but not S. aureus. That’s because they use viruses to do it! My work looks at trying to understand how S. aureus uses viruses to share DNA, and what genes they have that affect this process!

I’ve not gone anywhere yet, but hopefully I’ll get to travel the world and talk about my work in a few years’ time. And when I do, maybe you’ll recognise me!
My Typical Day:

Most days the first thing I do is see if my bacteria have grown, and then I use them for all sorts of experiments. I’ll usually put some bacteria together in a tube, and add some virus, and then let them grow. The next day, I have a look and see what happened!

Jacob Wildfire