Profile

I’m not actually a scientist at all – well, not since my A levels! I’m a professional writer and communicator who loves the environment, nature and projects that are making a real difference in the world. My role includes running the social media feeds, blogs, videos and everything else that gets the stories from the Darwin Tree of Life Project to the public.

I never really knew what I wanted to do throughout school and university, and didn’t even end up being a journalist. But I think the fact that I really enjoy what I do now is a good lesson to any students who are stressed about what to be in their career.

After school I took a gap year. I got a job ordering prosthetic body parts for a local hospital, which meant I could save enough money to go travelling around the world.

For my BA, I studied History at Cambridge University. Following that, I spent another year doing a series of unpaid internships (many of which I think would be technically illegal today) and decided I wanted to become a journalist. So I applied for a Master’s to train as an investigative journalist at City University London.

Since then I’ve had jobs as a reporter (the highlight of which might be interviewing Stormzy about his favourite Nando’s order), and then worked on political campaigns in both the UK and Canada. I had always been obsessed with wildlife since I was a kid – especially the smaller, less cuddly ones. So now my career in the media and my hobby wandering the countryside looking for cool bugs has come together on this project.

The role of communications is really important in science, where the harsh reality is that if no one knows what you’re doing they might not continue funding your research. Lots of scientists are great communicators too, and run their own social media feeds or write their own blogs. But they’re also very busy doing actual science in the lab. My job is to gather together all the different interesting stuff that the different scientists are up to and turn this into a big story about all the great work the project is doing. That doesn’t have to be just a story with words, it can be with video or pictures or audio. In fact, communications is much more visual than it has ever been before thanks to the popularity of social media channels and video streaming online.

I usually get to work just before 9 and leave just after 5. But between those times, what I do depends on what interesting stuff is happening on the project that day. A big part of my job is talking to the scientists to find out what they’re going to be working on in the future, so I’m ready to tell the public about it when it happens.