Profile

I live in my home city of Liverpool and work at the University of Liverpool. My partner is from Los Angeles, so we spend a lot of time there visiting with her friends and family, as well as in Canada which I love! I am a big outdoors guy and enjoy fishing, walking and climbing. I am also a Motorbike enthusiast, and so spend an unhealthy amount of time tinkering with my collection (as they never work!). I am a insane Liverpool FC supporter and have attended the games with my Dad since I was a small boy. I like reading and am a life-long fan of The Simpsons (who isn’t?).

My work involves medical research of joint injuries and diseases (things like arthritis). We figure out ways to help people with these problems using surgical implants – you may know someone who has had a new hip or knee, or has had screws or pins put into a broken bone. We make our implants using 3D Printing technology, which allows us to make a lot of complex implants designs a reality.

In the mornings I do a bit of admin – answering emails, arranging meetings and so on. After the boring stuff is done, I usually go down to one of the laboratories I use here at the univeristy. I am a biomedical engineer, and so I work in both the biology labs and engineering labs. In the biology labs I often check up on my cells – we have to grow them and keep them healthy for use in our experiments. In the engineering labs I design and make the implants that we want to test. We do this using Additive Manufacturing (you may know it as 3D Printing) – the type of 3D printing we use is called Selective Laser Melting where we print in metal, usually titanium!

The best thing about my work day is that I work with a lot of different people – many think that researchers spend their days alone reading text books or something.. actually we get to team-up with people from all kinds of different backgrounds which is really cool.

When we think of joint diseases – like arthiritis – we usually think of elderly people. However, there are a large number of children in Britain who suffer from Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis – JIA for short – and without our help, they will spend the rest of their lives suffering with their illness.

While a lot of money is donated for medical research to cures, not so much is given to help the children and their families understand JIA, and learn to deal with it in their day-to-day lives. The Children’s Chronic Arthritis Association- CCAA for short – is a charity that brings families of JIA sufferers together for fun activities that are designed to educate them about the disease keep them upto date with the latest JIA research and raise awareness.  

From CCAA website.