Profile

I’ve always been fascinated by how our bodies and brains work. At school I liked art but also wanted to do medicine. I studied biology, French, German and chemistry at A-level. I got a place at UCL to do medicine but didn’t work hard enough for my A-levels and didn’t get the grades. Luckily UCL accepted me to do biomedical sciences and I worked very hard to make up for my A-level laziness!
I got a summer project in a neuroscience lab and loved it. I did a masters in neuroscience and then got accepted in to medical school later, but decided to do a PhD in neuroscience at UCL instead.

I love public engagement – talking to non-scientists about how our brains work! I like going to festivals and giving talks there, which I do a fair bit. I often work with a great company called Guerilla Science who mix art and music and science to make science (even) more interesting.

I’m also writing and drawing a comic that teaches biology as a story (helenselement.com). I’m still working on it so don’t judge too harshly please!

I like art, music (I play guitar a bit) swimming, squash, going out and about in London and partying with mates.
I like films and reading, especially Sci Fi because I really like seeing what people think our future could be.

I work on mice. I change their brain circuits and see how this changes their behaviour.
We have very clever ways of turning mouse brain cells on and off. When we do this, we can see the mouse’s behaviour change, so that tells us a bit about what different parts of the brain do what.

If we can understand how the brain is wired up, we can understand what’s different in people that have differences in their brain, like depression, schizophrenia or ADHD.

I’m also really interested in the mistakes our brains make! Our brains are far from perfect – we forget things, make bad decisions and make assumptions about the world that aren’t right. I think if people understood their own minds more, we’d be more accepting and caring of others, and get along better.

I spend almost all my time teaching mice to do things. I give them rewards if they react the right way to a stimulus (like a moving light or a smell). If they react by licking at a little spout, I give them a reward. Most of my day is taken up doing this. I spend a fair bit of time at a computer writing code to analysing all the data from my experiments. Some days I do surgeries on the mice to put implants into their brains that let us record from brain cells or switch brain cells on and off.