Calendar13 – Helen and Eleanor toasting the New Year

Toasting January 2014This is the January 2014 page from ScienceGrrl’s 2013 calendar – toasting the New Year!  It stars:

Helen Czerski, PhD, studies the bubbles made in breaking waves to understand how they affect our weather and climate. These bubbles are one of the tiny links in the hugely complex system that is our planet, in which everything is connected to everything else. The more we know about such links, the better our weather and climate forecasts will become.

Helen co-presented a three-part BBC2 series, Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey, in March 2012. Much of Helen’s work takes place outside of the lab, where she is happy to do cartwheels at the slightest excuse.

Eleanor Stride, PhD, is a biomedical engineer specialising in medical imaging and drug delivery. In the lab, she fabricates microscopic bubbles coated with everything from protein to gold nanoparticles, which can be used to both detect and treat diseases including cancer and stroke. Bubbles that are used to treat disease have a drug encapsulated within them. This encapsulation allows the drug’s passage through the body to be tracked, and its released controlled, so it is delivered to the exact target site at the right time with minimal side effects.

Eleanor is hopelessly addicted to dancing – particularly ballroom and swing. When not in the lab, she is usually found on the dance floor, often until the early morning. She also loves painting and swimming, where she can observe bubbles in their natural habitat.

The other pages from the calendar are here.