Profile

I am a life long scientist at heart. Since I was a young, I’ve always been intrigued about how the world works, and I am grateful for my entourage who always encouraged me to follow my curiosity!

I was born in Montreal, Canada, in the province of Quebec. There, we speak French, which always surprises a lot of people! We start learning English at a very young age, a lot of us are fully bilingual, especially in the big cities like Montreal! It also snows a lot and gets very cold.

I moved to the UK last year to start my PhD. A PhD is the highest level of school qualification you can get. I’ve been in school for 22 years! 😮

I think my love of reading goes hand in hand with my love of science. All these different, worlds, different ideas, all coming together to form works of art you can get lost in. Almost just like travelling as well!

I have now been to 23 different countries (11% of the world)! And I love that being a scientist in Academia allows me to go to conferences all around the world. 🌍

As a PhD student, I am both a student and working. I don’t have to take any classes!

My PhD work is on the development of new therapeutics. In your body, in every cell, there is a recipe book that contains all the instruction to make your body work. It’s called your DNA. But sometimes, there’s mistakes in the recipes, so when your body makes a copy of it to start baking, the recipe doesn’t work! That’s how genetic diseases work, and sometimes cancers too. My job is to combine chemistry and biology to find tools that can find the mistakes in the copy, or RNA, and cut it down so that the botched recipe doesn’t become a problem!

When I get to my office, my day usually starts with checking and answering emails and planning my day. Some days, I focus on reading. It’s important to keep up to date on what other people are doing in your field of research, to help you understand the science better as well as not repeating something someone has already done. Research is all about discovering new things and creating knowledge.

Other days, I am very busy with experiments. In practice, it’s a lot of mixing different transparent liquids to create new things. It’s a bit like doing magic! It’s quite exciting. DNA is made up of little building blocks called nucleotides. I can use enzymes, which are big proteins that work like little machines, to connect the blocks like Legos to make a long chain, or I have a machine called a Mermade that can make it for me as well.

At the end of the day, regardless of what I did, I write down everything that happened in my Lab Journal. This way, I never lose track of my ideas and my experiments, so everything is easy to access when I’m ready to publish an article about my work!