Profile

I came from Thailand to the UK around 9 years ago and spent time in Folkestone, Croydon, Bristol, and now I’m in Cambridge doing a PhD. All my families are back in Thailand including my husband (Thanks internet!).

I’m crazy about behind-the-scenes of movies and shows and I always sit in a cinema until the end of movie credit. It gets me appreciate the amount of work and the army of people that go into that piece of 2-hour show. I also get crafty from time to time, especially when I want to add a personal touch or when I want something so specific that it’s too time-consuming to look for in shops. Some people have said to me, “Oh Koi, you should be doing art!”, and all I can say is, “I just happened to have many interests!..and actually, science and art are not that different!”

Random facts:
– Love chocolate, smell of coffee, and time with nature.
– Have a (very very good) sense of smell; tend to be the first one who smell something.
– I live in Cambridge but I don’t own a bike.

These worms infect human by burrowing through intact skin, and find their way into blood vessels then spend the rest of its life in the bloodstream – growing up, mating, and releasing eggs into the outside world. The parasite is called Schistosoma mansoni and we sometimes call them ‘Schisto’.

Here is what the adult worms look like under a microscope

The actual size is being compared to a pen in this photo. The worms look blue-ish here because I stained them with chemical dyes.

My interest is largely on the understanding of the parasite biology – what the parasites do in the blood, and whether they sense any cue inside the host that tell them to grow or to move about. By knowing these, it could lead to better protection and treatment for people at risk of infection. Even more, given that the blood is not quite a friendly environment to live in but this parasite can live there for yeeeeeeeeaaars(!), understanding how the worms do that can teach us more about how our bodies work and this might be useful for other blood- and immune-related diseases (maybe).

I used a technique called RNA-sequencing which show how the parasites use different genes over their life time. This technique gives a large amount of information and the next fun job is to make sense of such big data. Because it’s a big data, it also need a large variety of methods and knowledge, so in my work I do not work in isolation but discuss a lot with many experts who kindly share their knowledge and together we will move toward the understanding of the parasite world.

Sometimes I learnt something about the parasites from the data; sometimes I learn different ways to look into the data. Sometimes an experiment tells me something (not always good news but I still learn something). Sometimes discussion with people plus reading and writing give me new ideas.