Question: Obviously, your research involves at least some practical work, what with experimenting with enzymes (which sounds interesting), but is a lot of it theory? Or a large chunk of it?

Jo Sadler answered on 11 Mar 2015:

My job is a bit of both – to do the practical work properly I need to understand the theory behind it. This means I spend time reading up on a topic if it is something new or I don’t understand something, then I go into the lab and do their exoeriment . I supposed it’s roughly 30:70 theory to practical, but this varies depending on what I’m working on. For example, at the moment we are trying to understand exactly how my enzyme works – this is more theory based as we need to make predictions based on our knowledge of chemistry, enzymes and computational modelling. When we’ve made these predictions I’ll spend most of my time in the lab putting them to the test!