About Cath

Hi! I’m Cath. Welcome to my blog!

I was born in Ashington, England, and grew up mostly in York. I did my undergraduate degree in Genetics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and my PhD at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Laboratories in Glasgow. I moved to Vancouver in 2002 for a two year post-doc position at the Terry Fox Laboratory, met my husband after a year, and I’ve been here ever since. I’m now a Canadian citizen, and have the tattoo and the hockey jerseys to prove it.

I started blogging in May 2007, on Blogspot. I’d completed my postdoc a couple of years earlier and was working in marketing in the biotech industry, where the combination of boring, repetitive tasks and tight deadlines was gradually crushing my soul and dulling my brain. But then, one fateful day, I read a journal article about science blogs. I started to read and comment on a growing number of sites, found a community of like-minded people, and recognised a potential outlet for my own pent-up writing and scientific energies.

It worked like a charm; writing about science almost immediately made me feel more intelligent again, and blogging didn’t just brush the rust off my writing skills, it sharpened them considerably.

A few months later I managed to move back into academia, in my current grant wrangling / project management role. With my itch to write seriously about science now being (mostly) satisfied by my day job, my blog became progressively more silly. I experimented for a while with moving the scientific part of my blogging (most of which is also silly) to Nature Network, but in July 2010 I realised how much more satisfying it is to combine all my posts in one venue. I therefore moved all my writing back to my original Blogspot blog, before being invited to move here as a founding member of Occam’s Typewriter. Of course I jumped at the chance to join my friends, excellent writers all, in this exciting new venture!

When I’m not blogging or helping PIs with grants and manuscripts and such, I’m hanging out with my lovely hubby and two snuggly cats, out with friends, watching sport (England! Canada! Newcastle United! Vancouver Canucks!), reading, listening to music, or – my favourite – out and about in my adopted home town of Vancouver, BC, or in the great expanse of outdoor playground that surrounds this beautiful city.

And I blog about it all.

I hope you’ll join the VWXYNot? community, and take part in the silliness!

(And some serious discussions about science and life in general.

But mostly silliness).