Hannah Rowlands reflects on her secondment to the Protein Science team

We recently hosted our colleague Hannah Rowlands for a short secondment within our Protein Science labs at Birchwood House. She reflects below on her time spent within the team.

“I have been a member of the Sygnature Bioscience department at Alderley Park for just over 2 years now. My focus is predominantly enzymology and biophysics, meaning I am often working with recombinant proteins produced by the Protein Science department. While I had experience in handling and measuring function/activity of enzymes, I didn’t have a full understanding of how these proteins are made, and the intricacies that go into each project.

My time in Protein Science has been valuable and I’ve learnt a lot. I have mostly been working on protein purification, learning the theory behind various chromatography techniques and how to use the Akta systems – as well as running many SDS-PAGE gels! I’ve also been able to set up some crystallography experiments, and have worked to combine the capabilities of Protein Science and Bioscience to do some automated compound dosing for crystallography.

The work has been very different to what I’m used to in Bioscience but the training I’ve received has been great and everyone has been really welcoming and helpful. The amount of knowledge and experience in the group is really impressive, and I’m very grateful to everyone who has taken time to share this with me.

It’s been great to connect with my Protein Science colleagues and get to know how things operate over here, and at the same time explain a bit more about what we do over in Bioscience and talk about how we can work better together. I’m looking forward to applying my new knowledge to projects in the Bioscience department, and to work with Protein Sciences again on future projects.”

Hannah got involved with our “Elf on the shelf” Christmas LinkedIn campaign – see the link here for the SPR example.