• Question: what subject are you doing you PhD in?

    Asked by ninanoo to Helen, Dr D on 21 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by sahmed.
    • Photo: Andrew Devitt

      Andrew Devitt answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      I worked on Chlamydia for my PhD. This is an amazing organism. For years people thought it was a virus because it lives on cells. It isn’t. It’s a bacterium and it causes loads of problems. It can give you eye infections, pneumonia and can cause some pretty horrible sexually transmitted diseases. I tried to understand how our bodies responded to these bugs. It was a great project for training me in lots of new techniques.

    • Photo: Helen Tunbridge

      Helen Tunbridge answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I’m trying to understand how a particular treatment for the disease multiple sclerosis works, and how it alters the cells it affects.

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