Profile

Currently I am working and living in the Irish city of Dublin as a medical physicist. Although my Irish lessons are going slowly.

At weekends I like to go cycling and hiking to keep fit and enjoy the stunning views. I recently started as a referee in Olympic Freestyle Wrestling. I use to compete for the British national team when I was younger (I was British and Irish champion and 12th in the European Juniors) but now I referee.

I love travelling and exploring new places, so far I’ve visited over 40 countries. Last year I went to visit the Chernobyl exclusion zone with my best friend. We two days learning about the disaster, and learning about the local history. My goal is to visit every continent in the world.

Animal rescue is really important to me, and I spend a lot of my time volunteering. I fundraise for a couple of animal charities, rescue cats on occasions, go out to animal shelters abroad, as well as fostering dogs and cats until they find their forever home.

When I tell people I am a medical physicist, they always look confused and ask why is a physicist in a hospital. In modern medicine lots of imaging equipment uses radiation to look inside the body to diagnosis people, previously surgery would have been the only option. Part of my job is to make sure this equipment is safe. We perform lots of measurements before the equipment can be used, and analyse the images to make sure doctors can make the right diagnosis. Physicists are involved in room design, to make sure everyone outside of the X-ray rooms don’t receive unnecessary radiation. We may liaise with doctors and radiographers on selecting new equipment. We also need to protect members of staff working with radiation, and make sure protection methods are in place.

Another aspect is nuclear medicine – which is using radioactive medicine to image or treat people! Radiation is attached to a targeted pharmaceutical that is taken up by the body, doctors then can make a diagnosis or treat patients with this. Part of my job is to talk to patients who undergo nuclear medicine therapy, as they need to know all the radiation protection precautions to take.

In the morning I have to be in the radiopharmacy before patients arrive. I enter a clean lab wearing special gloves, coat, shoes and hair mask as we work in aseptic conditions. Quality assurance is a huge aspect of the job, we have to make sure equipment is performing as expected for the safety of patients, members of staff and the general public. So before anything can begin I perform quality control tests on equipment to make sure it’s working correctly, then I can begin making radiopharmaceuticals. When this has finished, we tend to go for coffee as it is highly focused work!

The rest of the day anything can happen! We may perform clinical audits, create risk assessments, optimise methods of acquiring images, perform quality control on equipment, attend radiation protection meetings – no two days are the same. Everyday I learn something new – there’s so much to learn. I love using my scientific knowledge to help people.