Holly Smith

I’m Holly, a PhD student in the Department of Pharmacology. My research looks at how cells use calcium ions to change their behaviour in response to outside signals such as hormones and pharmaceutical drugs. I use HeLa and other cultured human cell lines because they are easy to grow and manipulate. For example, we can introduce fluorescent markers targeted to proteins and molecules that we are interested in, and then view their location and dynamics using powerful microscopes. This helps us answer fundamental questions about the way the cells in our bodies work.