#MondayMaterials Episode 29 – Naa-dei Nikoi
Meet the Department 27th February 2017
Hello all. Welcome back once more. We’re on Episode 29 of #MondayMaterials now, and today we’re meeting Naa-dei Nikoi. Naa-dei is a PhD student working in the Biomaterials research area. It’s easy to forget that we have people in this school working on amazing medical advances, but Naa-dei was a stark reminder. As another piece of evidence that some of the most crucial research imaginable is happening here in the School of Materials, let’s need Naa-dei:
Hi Naa-dei. Thanks so much for talking to us. Could you please describe your research, for the layman, in ten sentences or less?
Well in a sentence, I make muscle.
To be more precise, one of the real challenges we have when some suffers an injury that our body isn’t able to repair is that the cells within that tissue lose their spatial guidance, their sense of where they need to be and what they need to do. With muscles, they need to be able to join end to end in order to form a single muscle that can transmit from here to here so I can move my hand.
So what I’m doing is I’m using a very cheap material which everyone knows – cellulose, the stuff we make paper out of. I’m taking out crystals and lining them up, and we’re finding that they’re able to allow muscles to guide themselves and go ‘oh, this is what we need to do’.
I find it really quite exciting to actually see muscular tissue. And now I’m working on creating what we call scaffolds, things that actually sit free and make little tubes that hopefully, in the long term, we can actually use to repair someone’s injury.
Wow – that is very impressive. So obviously you’ve touched on this, but could you tell us a bit more about how the public can benefit from your research?
Sure. So my work specifically, hopefully, can benefit, very directly, people who have suffered muscle injuries. For example, somebody who’s come off a motorbike and they’ve not just broken their arm but taken a chunk out of it as well. In those cases you can repair the nerves and the bones and so on, but you’ll find that you’re quite weak.
But more generally, because my field is interested in how we can use materials to help the body repair itself, I’m hoping that we can lead to new generations of materials that can help people knit bones better, repair skin better, and… It’s a very humbling process, and one that I hope can – I don’t want to say revolutionise medicine, but more like evolve it such that we enhance the healing process. So we allow people to heal their bodies to a much better extent than is currently possible.
And how did you first get interested in the research area?
My research area? Well, it was a mouse!
More precisely, it was the sight of the first tissue engineered cartilage. The guy doing it had grafted the ear onto the back of a nude mouse and shown that you could actually get the mouse’s cells to go into this artificial ear, and it was featured on the old BBC programme QED.
And at that time I was thinking I was going to be a vet, but then I saw this and I was like ‘This is possible? This is what I want to do.’ And that’s what persuaded me from thinking ‘yeah, I want to be a vet’ to actually going into materials science. And I’ve not regretted it a day.
Brilliant, thank you. A great answer, and similar to one from Sarah Cartmell earlier in the #MondayMaterials series. Going back a bit further, then, can you tell us who or what first inspired your interest in science?
For science, it would have to be this book by Isaac Asimov, it was called Jupiter. It was a really tiny little book and he’d written about the planet Jupiter – I think I was about seven or eight or so. It wasn’t just cool facts about it, but also how we knew what we knew.
Up until that age, you read things, and they are just presented as ‘these are the facts, the laws of nature’. The idea that you could actually investigate, and actually go ‘okay, so this is how I know how bright a planet is’. And albedo, which drove my parents crazy – ‘what do you mean about albedo?’ Then it was ‘how do you weigh a planet? How do you work out how hot it is without going there?’
And just having those answers made me a very annoying person, because I kept asking my friends ‘how do you know that?’ And my teachers, too. But it’s what got me into science, and here I am, I guess.
Lovely! So moving away from work for a minute, can you tell us about your other interests? What do you get up to in your spare time?
In my spare time I used to volunteer as a first aider with St John’s Ambulance. But currently I volunteer with a very small charity called Streets Ahead. On Sunday evenings we go around Piccadilly Gardens looking for rough sleepers and give out food packages, warm clothes, and so on. I find that a very humbling process, and also a very rewarding one.
Other than that, I’m a junkie for travelling. Especially for just hopping in a car and going out to the next city or the countryside, just having a good wander around.
And I spend way too much time reading books, I love it. And I go to the theatre when I can afford it, which isn’t always.
Impressive stuff again, Naa-dei. Thank you. Can you tell us how being here in Manchester helps you work and research?
Being in Manchester is a bit like trying to drink water form a fire hydrant – there’s just so much!
I’ve loved the interdisciplinary of Manchester. I spend some of my time here in the School of Materials and some of my time over at the Children’s Hospital, where I’m just blown away by the amount of research people do.
It’s just so exciting that you can almost always just pick up a phone and find a world expert in just about anything you can talk about. I love the fact that our labs are really well resourced. And I love the library. I don’t think people appreciate just how incredible it is that almost any document, any material, I could possibly imagine wanting, I only need to ask a librarian and somehow they can make it possible. It’s great. You can’t underestimate it.
Lovely, thanks Naa-dei. I couldn’t agree more with your closing statements. Thanks so much for talking with us, your work sounds hugely exciting and important. Readers, please go to the website to learn more about Materials in Manchester. And keep coming back to the blog for more insights into our world!
BiomaterialsMaterials ScienceMuscle InjuryThe University of Manchester
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ben harrison says
excuse me naa-dei, why are you wearing my lab coat 😉