Estelle Nassar is a laboratory research officer in Jonny Kohl's group at the Crick. She's working on computational pipelines to analyse brain imaging data.
Tim Little is a PhD student in Jean Langhorne's group at the Crick, studying the genomic makeup of malaria.
I expected an interesting conversation – and I got it!
I didn’t know anything, to be honest. I’m a relatively new starter at the Crick and a new starter to biomedical research, so there are still lots of fields that I’m not very familiar with. My background is in engineering and I’m currently working in a neuroscience lab, so immunology was a complete unknown.
We spent almost the whole time talking about our research. We did talk a little bit about what we did before joining the Crick and found that we had a link through Imperial – I did my undergraduate degree there and Tim is currently enrolled at Imperial for his PhD.
Not really. We talked about the fact that we are essentially moving in different directions between experimental biology and computational biology. I’m an engineer trying to learn more about wet lab techniques and working in a neuroscience group, and Tim is an immunologist with a wet lab background who is doing more computational work.
We spoke a bit about how he had changed his PhD project to focus more on the computational side of things rather than the wet lab work that he was used to. I’ll be applying for PhDs next year and it helped me to realise that I have the agency to steer my project based on my own interests and needs. It’s going to be four years of my life – I want to know how it’s going to pan out!
Nothing – he realised that I didn’t know much about his field and he explained everything really well. He had a knack for explaining biological concepts very clearly.
Probably not! I may be wrong, but I don’t think malaria can cross the blood-brain barrier!
I was hoping to meet someone new from a totally different group at the Crick and that’s exactly what happened.
I mean – I knew what a brain was. But that might have been about it! I have a few friends that are working in the same general area, but I didn’t know too much about Estelle’s specific field of research.
Mostly our work! We meant to talk about other things, but we were both clearly so interested in each other’s projects that it took over the conversation a bit.
I was a little bit surprised that she’s from a bioengineering background, but that’s not too shocking here. It was interesting to hear about how she’s got up to speed with biology in her project at the Crick, despite it being her first real experience of being a biologist.
She oozes enthusiasm for her work. I found it really easy to be interested in what she was talking about, because she found it fascinating herself. I think it’s really important to be show passion for your work as a scientist, and it reminded me how much of a difference it can make when you’re explaining your work to other people.
Not really. I always find neurophysiology a bit of a difficult one, but on the whole I was able to pick it up. However I think we would need a longer chat for me to figure out her project entirely!
I think our fields are a bit too distant, unfortunately. Although she did describe some cool imaging techniques that I’d love to try out. Maybe you’ll see some 3D reconstructions of malaria parasites in the near future…?
