I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool in England where I teach Laboratory Skills to Masters students, Experimental Design to PhD students, and run writing courses for Postgraduate students. I currently have five PhD students working in my laboratory and each year I also supervise three to four undergraduate and four to five Masters-level project students. Much of the content in this book actually started life as the handouts and lecture notes from the courses I teach. As the years have passed and the material grown it realised that I had generated a resource that would be more useful gathered togetehr into a single volume book that could be easily shared. Hence, this book.

In addition to teaching, I run a molecular biology research lab focused on cell to extracellular matrix interactions (LaNts and laminins). My team’s work encompasses a range of scales from whole organism human disease samples and transgenic animals, to ex vivo, 2D and 3D cell cultures, and molecular or protein biochemistry measuring alternative splicing and protein-protein interactions in vitro. I have written and reviewed many papers and serve as an associate editor on research journals within my field. Some of the examples within this book come from my research; however, the core messages apply equally well across the entire biological sciences and medicine disciplines.

Before moving to the University of Liverpool, I was a post-doctoral researcher and then Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Chicago. In total, I spent almost seven years working in the USA. I obtained my PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Dundee, Scotland. For most things in science, the location of the lab does not make a difference. However, I have attempted to point out local differences wherever these are relevant.