Matt Eagling

Hi! I'm a 2022 Young Graduate Trainee and new member of the ACT specialising in Biophysics!

I graduated from Imperial College London with an integrated Batchelors and Master of Science (MSci) in Geology & Geophysics in 2020, which meant I was lucky enough to spend a significant portion of my degree outdoors visiting beautiful places, hitting things with hammers, collecting rock and fossil samples, making colourful maps and basically making every other student jealous! For my master’s year I specialised in Exobiology, working in a geochemical laboratory studying the feasibility of the abiotic generation of life within the hypothesised sub-surface oceans of Enceladus.

Seeing as I had the misfortune to graduate in the midst of the first outbreaks of COVID-19, I decided to temporarily postpone further education and join a COVID laboratory to gain some practical lab experience outside of university while contributing to the ongoing effort to handle the pandemic. I moved from London to Cambridge to work as a lab scientist as part of the collaboration between AstraZeneca, CRL, GSK and The University of Cambridge providing COVID diagnostics. As this was a brand-new area at the time, I got to spend lots of time troubleshooting new procedures and protocols, teaching new scientists, and learning how to operate very cool, very expensive equipment. Even though I got to wear hospital scrubs and generally feel like I was on the set of a medical TV show, I am still a little bit disappointed I never once got to wear the full yellow hazmat suit like they do in the movies! When COVID diagnostics migrated to an entirely NHS run network in 2021, I moved to a new COVID lab in Bracknell where I worked as a Specialist Practitioner and got to operate even more expensive automated workstations and advanced laboratory robots!

I left the NHS in August of 2021 and returned to Imperial College London where I undertook a Research Masters (MRes) in Systems & Synthetic Biology. For my thesis I was engineering strains of plant-symbiotic bacteria as part of a project to enhance current approaches to the phytoremediation (the use of plants negate or remove pollutants from an environment) of anthropogenic heavy metal pollution.

When I'm not working, I am usually one of three places - (1) Out running, cycling, swimming or in the gym compensating for the amount of time I spend sitting at a computer; (2) In my kitchen, trying to expand my cooking repertoire; (3) Trying to fit in any one of my far too many hobbies which usually involve me sat at my home desk reading, drawing, writing, building or painting...something!