Profile

Hi!  I’m Greg, I live in York and I’m a medical imaging researcher.  Before I came here I worked for the NHS in Newcastle, and I’ve also been a youth worker in Manchester.  I like all the normal things: films, music etc, and I can never get out of bed on Saturday mornings.

My main hobby is cycling: I used to be a mountain biker when I lived near any mountains, now I love going on relaxed cafe rides with friends, or going on tour and getting lost in the middle of countries you’ve never heard of, carrying nothing more than I can fit in my saddlebag.  I’m trying to visit all the countries of Europe – there are 47 of them – preferably by bike, but my girlfriend’s a non-cyclist so I might have to start taking some non-cycling holidays!

Back at home, I do like a good pub quiz – and sometimes we even win them.  It’s a bit geeky I know – being able to quote all the states of America is rather sad, but you do learn some interesting stuff.  I guess that’s why like being a scientist, and also why I like travel: there are so many fascinating things out there in the world, and I learn something new every day.

My work is about designing new, safe, low-cost ways to detect cancer, so we can put scanners in more places, scan people more regularly and find it – and stop it – earlier.  The problems with the ways we have of imaging cancer at the moment are that they’re either really expensive (like Magnetic Resonance Imaging) or else they use high energy particles (like CT scans or PET scans), which need to be closely controlled so they don’t cause a danger to people around the scanner.  I’m trying to detect cancer using the thermal radiation emitted by your body, so it’s completely safe and can be used anywhere.  In the future, I hope that systems like this could be in every GP surgery, so you can scan people quite often, and catch the cancers before they become a problem.

Come in, have a coffee, turn on the apparatus to warm up, have another coffee, decide I’m definitely not a morning person … answer emails, try to put off doing whatever I’m meant to be doing, wish I could wake up; did I tell you I wasn’t a morning person?

I’ve got several mini-projects on the go at any one time. Most of my time is currently spent designing parts for the imaging system I’m building; in a few months when it’s finished, I’ll start doing serious experiments with it.  Last week I was testing some new sensors that the company built for us.  Right now I’m designing the electronics that will transfer the data from the sensors to the computer, and then I’ll need to program the computer to process the images.  My project is joint between the university and a company called Sylatech, so I might be at either site I’m at the university today but I need to go to the company net week: they built the sensors and we need to decide whether they’re good enough or whether they need redesigning.

At the same time as this, I’m doing some experiments to investigate what we should be able to detect with the finished system.  This basically involves getting a lot of beefburgers, heating them to different temperatures and pointing an antenna at them to look at what radiation they emit.  You can’t just do experiments without thinking about them though, so before I start I have to spend a long time reading the scientific literature and then thinking very hard about how to design the experiments, otherwise the results I get will just be nonsense data.

Soon, the university will start recruiting undergraduate students for their final year projects, so I’m trying to think of a project they could do as part of this work: it would be good for the students to be able to work on something really cutting-edge.

Finally, a lot of life as a scientist is doing the same sort of hundred milllion semi-unimportant tasks that crop up in any job: filling in spreadsheets of expenses, doing risk assessments, all that kind of stuff.  Sorry guys but you can’t escape those whatever job you do!