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We all take our sight for granted and we often don’t think about how different life would be if we lost our ability to see. Imagine not being able to watch your favourite football team on a Saturday or check out a photo of that hot guy that your best friend fancies!

There are lots of disorders which can cause vision loss, especially diabetes, which makes blood vessels in the eye leaky. High blood pressure can also cause large veins in the eye to close over and this stops blood flow in the retina which can lead to blindness.

I use mouse models of these disorders to try and prevent vision loss. I use special imaging equipment called angiography and optical coherence tomography (OCT for short!) to look at the blood vessels and retina in the eyes of mice. I then inject the eyes with a special type of stem cell which helps to repair the damaged blood vessels. The stem cells we use come from blood and we all have them in our bodies. Everyone in the lab volunteers to have blood taken and then we process it to get the cells that we need for our experiments.

I can do lots of different things in a single day depending on what experiments I’m running! Sometimes I can be at my desk in the office all day drinking cherry coke while reading research papers and writing up my own experiments. Other days I can be in the lab making up microscope slides and imaging them to get lots of pretty fluorescent pictures of stem cells in the eye. Some days I’ll be looking after my mice, making sure that they’re all happy and healthy. This is especially important if the mice are diabetic, as they need extra care. If it’s a really busy day then I might be doing a bit of everything and unfortunately for me this usually happens on a Friday when I want to scoot off early! No such luck!