Profile – I'm a Project

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About Me:

I am a biologist with a love of everything which crawls, flies or hops!
My Work:

My work focuses on finding and collecting samples, mostly insects, for DNA barcoding and whole genome sequencing. You’d be most likely to find me outdoors on a field trip or at the Natural History Museum in London.
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I’m lucky enough to call the Natural History Museum my office. Something which continually amazes me about my job is walking through the galleries when no one else is there.

Once I’ve arrived at my desk I work with colleagues to build the collections of insects in the museum. We plan field trips to all corners of the country, sampling various habitats, and collecting new species – some are much easier to find than others. Eventually, we want to find all of the insects species in the Uk, that’s over 24000 species!

Another aspect of my job is maintaining the cold chain in order to preserve DNA for DNA barcoding and whole genome sequencing. This means working with dry ice which sits at -78°C and, even colder still, liquid nitrogen at -196°C. That’s much colder than the average temperature of Antarctica which is -60°C in the coldest areas.

Work History:
- I volunteered at the Natural History Museum (NHM) throughout the course of my degree working on various projects including the annual butterfly house and cataloguing every species of whitefly, a common plant pest.
- After my degree, I did a traineeship at NHM called ‘Identification Trainers for the Future’. This was great fun, I was trained by scientists from all over the museum and got to work with the mayfly collection!
- A short-term contract funded by National Geographic followed. I sorted malaise traps preparing the samples for environmental DNA analysis.
- More recently, I started my PhD on the London NERC DTP.

Laura Sivess