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I study diet in pregnancy and have been involved in showing that what a woman eats when she is expecting has an effect on the health of her baby, not just as a child but also as it ages. When mums diet is poor, babies are born smaller. People who are born smaller are more likely to have heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.

My work looks at two things. The thing I enjoy the most , is working out how it works. Why does mum’s diet have an effect on the health of her child maybe 70 years later. We work with animals to try and get to the bottom of this. By feeding either low protein or high fat diets to pregnant rats we find that their babies grow up to have conditions like diabetes and heart disease. We showed that feeding junk food in pregnancy makes the babies behave differently too- they become risk-takers that like to over-eat. Because we are using animals we can measure things in their organs to see how diet acts on genes that are linked to disease.

The other thing that we do is working out what can we do with this knowledge to make life better for people. We do work that looks at how controlling women’s weight during pregnancy might protect children from disease and are also interested in the effects of breastfeeding and the ways in which babies are weaned onto solid food.

One of the hard things about being a scientist is finding the right balance between work and home life. I really value my free time and try hard to avoid letting work take over (usually this is an Epic Fail). I have 5 children (aged 9-25) and a new granddaughter. My day always starts with having to drag teenagers out of bed! I am pretty cruel some days and have a lot of tools I can use on my 13 year old son (bells, a hooter, wooden spoon).

When I am at work my days are very varied really because I have so many different responsibilities within the University. What I do depends on the time of year. Universities have even longer summer holidays than schools (4 months!) but the staff don’t take all of that time off. In the summer we do research all the time and in term time, time gets sucked up into other things.

I could break it down into three areas that cover most days.

1. Teaching. I spend about a quarter of my time teaching students. Some of these are undergraduates (students doing their first degree) and this involves giving lectures to big groups (sometimes 200 in a class). I also teach and train students studying for a PhD, which is always one-to-one. I have PhD students from all over the world in my group at the moment with people from Oman, Uganda and Malaysia as well as the UK.

2. Research. This is the best bit of my day. In the past, doing research meant I actually went into the lab with my white coat to do the experiments. These days I don”t do that very often and instead I have the ideas and direct my staff and students to do the work. I then get to do lots of thinking about what the results mean and about what we need to do next.

3. Boring stuff. The University is made up of lots of smaller units called Schools. I am the Deputy Head of School so that means I have a lot of things to do that we call “Admin”. Admin is a word that on some days means “boring” and on other days means “irritating”. It’s got to be done though and it involves dealing with money and planning ahead for what the School needs to do.