Alarm went off at 8.30am. I have to be at my office in the University of Glasgow by 9.30am. I skip breakfast as I would rather have another 15 minutes sleep. I walk to work. It takes 10 minutes through Kelvingrove Park. It is a delightful start to the day as there is so much happening in the park at springtime and it is sunny. Glasgow receives about 140cm of rain a year so when the sun is out we truly appreciate it. I really value the fact I can walk to work. I don’t have a long boring commute or waste any of my life in traffic jams.

I work in a small group based in the 550 year old University of Glasgow. We run school science events and recruit students into science. Our team enjoys a lot of freedom to work the times that suit each of us. As a result we are a happy and productive team. I don’t think I could work without that freedom and I really value the trusting atmosphere of a university culture.

I spend the first part of the day at my computer answering e-mails. I share an office with a bunch of smiley, friendly, talented and positive people. They are all extremely good at their jobs but there is always time for gossip, banter, jokes and silliness. I love my work. I think you have to love your work as it takes up so much of your life. I don’t think I could bear to work in an office where people didn’t laugh, or to do a job that had little meaning to me.

Later on in the morning I have a meeting with colleagues at the Glasgow Science Centre, about a mile away. I always love to visit GSC as it is a stunning building. In the afternoon I go to one of our school events. This is part of a project where we have pupils visit the university to give them an idea of what life is like here.

I get home by 6.30pm. Later, I go to have dinner in a local Kurdish/Iranian restaurant. It’s wonderfully cheap, tasty and healthy and many of my friends can be found here on a daily basis. Then we go to the pub.

I used to happily work much later but work has changed a lot of the last 10 years. That is one thing that I love about my career in science - the variation in what I have done from year to year and from day to day. Over this last week my work has taken me to Spain, England, and various cities in Scotland. Ten years ago I was a researcher on a large European experiment, working in France, Italy and Germany. Since then, I have worked with lots of different types of people in schools, museums, laboratories, in China, Canada and the US. When I was at school I wanted to be a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor and once on a school trip to IBM I declared I would be head of IBM one day (cringe, yuk, that’s horribly embarrassing). I still want to have lots of different jobs and science has let me develop a lot of skills and the confidence to think I can do pretty much anything I wish. I couldn’t bear to be doing the same thing from day to day.

That has been my Day in Science, 15 April 2005.