Profile

I live in Edinburgh with my girlfriend – we’re getting married in November so I’m having to plan for that a lot at the moment as well as doing my research! We met in London because we worked down there for a few years. I actually spent a long time between going to university and starting my PhD when I worked in finance (even though my degree was in Zoology!), so I spent 8 years working in London as an accountant.  However, we’re both from Scotland so when I decided I wanted to become a scientist and do a PhD I looked for one up here.

Me checking out some good trees in Wales

It’s been great to move back  to do my PhD and Edinburgh is a beautiful city – I live near a big park and go running a lot. I really love running around the park and the woods in Spring because you get to see all the trees turning green and the different flowers coming out. In fact, I like running a lot in general. I just ran the Edinburgh half marathon and have another race coming up where I have to run around all the seven hills that are in Edinburgh.

When I’m not working or running we go to the cinema a lot – we saw Avengers: Endgame the other week which we thought was amazing. We also go hiking and are trying to climb lots of Munros (big mountains in Scotland). Finally, I bake a lot. I find it really relaxing and like making my own bread.

On a particularly cold hill walk near Edinburgh

Pollination is when an insect visits a flower and leaves pollen from another flower on it. This is how plants reproduce and make seeds. Pollinators like bees or hoverflies are really important for plants because a lot of plants, but not all, need to be pollinated in order to produce seeds. This is also very important for many food crops like wheat, apples, radishes and tomatoes as the amount of pollination they receive affects how much food we get from them. About three-quarters of the world’s main crops rely on pollinators for this, so pollination is really important for our food supply!

This is a hoverfly – it might look like a wasp but it just pretends. It can’t actually sting. It is an important pollinator. 

My work looks at whether pollination is being affected by climate change. Because climate change is affecting the weather and temperature of the environment, it’s also affecting when plants flower and when pollinators start flying. This means that pollinators now sometimes come out at a different time to when the plants they should be pollinating come out.

Another hoverfly pretending to be a bee. These are coming out about a month earlier in the year than they did 40 years ago.

To try to measure the effect of this I grow lots of plants and put them outside at different times of the year to see whether this affects the number and the species of pollinators that visit them (there are about 250 species of bee in the UK and 200 species of hoverfly). I then see whether this affects how many seeds they produce.

My typical day changes a lot throughout the year. At the moment I’m spending a lot of time in the greenhouse and in the gardens because I do lots of fieldwork this time of year. I’m growing about 200 plants, so in the morning I go to the greenhouse and water them all. Then I need to re-pot some of them, plant some new ones and check they’re all healthy. Then I prepare them to go in the field. This means I have to count the number of flowers on each one (I use radishes, so they can have a couple of hundred flowers on each plants) then I have to pollinate some of the flowers by hand (I use a paintbrush and paint pollen onto them) and some I bag up in netting so they can’t be pollinated. Then I take them out into the field and sit with them all day checking how many insects visit them and what species they are.

All my plants growing in the greenhouse 

Some days I get up at sunrise to do this and some days I do it until sunset – I have to vary what time of day I’m out there at because different pollinators are out at different times of the day. It’s hard work sometimes but I enjoy it and I only do this for a few weeks. It’s great being outside and seeing things you wouldn’t get to see in the office – the other day I was in the middle of a big honey bee swarm but luckily I didn’t get stung!

Other times of the year my work is totally different. In the winter there aren’t any pollinators around, so I do a lot of work indoors writing up my research and doing statistics on the computer trying to understand all the information I’ve collected. I also have lots of meetings with the other researchers in my laboratory, I teach some lessons to the undergraduates and sometimes I go to research conferences where you present your work to lots of other scientists from around the world.