Profile

Photo:

Caroline Mullen

    • About Me:

      I live in Aberdeen and I’m an ecologist during the day, I am a trained teacher too so I tutor in my evenings as well as trying to grow fruit and veg in my garden and allotment.

    • Read more

      I live in Aberdeen with my partner and have two cats.  I am from Aberdeen, but lived in the south of England and London for a decade, moving back up here in 2022 to help my parents as they were ill.  I love animals and decided I’d be a zoologist at the age of about 5, even when I didn’t know what it was.  I love music, comedy, theatre and films and see as many bands and shows as possible.  I have an allotment and a garden and grow lots of fruit and veg.

    • My pronouns are:

      She/Her

    • My Work:

      As an ecologist at SEPA my job is to monitor the health of the rivers in Scotland by looking at what is living within them.

    • Read more

      As part of river monitoring I look at a few different indices of river health.  These include invertebrates (bugs/beasties), plants, bacteria and algae.  All of them tell you a different part of the story of the health of a river.  For example if there is pollution in a river, we can usually tell what kind by which invertebrates are living there.

       

      We can get called out to investigate incidents when a problem such as pollution happens in a river, this means we have to go get evidence that there is a problem which helps the other teams in SEPA to get the people responsible for the problem to fix it.

    • My Typical Day:

      I arrive at work and check my emails, the daily schedule and SEPA news page. I then head to the lab to analyse samples taken earlier in the year.  This is usually a tray of preserved river sediment mixed with bugs, where I have to find the bugs and put them in petri dishes where I then will look at them under a microscope to identify them.  This can take a long time!  I then will enter the data into a database which will give me some scores, these scores tell us whether the river is clear or not.  We work flexible hours at SEPA but I usually come in around 9am and leave around 5, but some of my colleagues start at 7.30 and finish at 3.30 or start at 10 and finish at 6, as long as we do enough hours we are trusted when to do them.

       

      I also have days of fieldwork to take these samples, where I will be driving to a few different rivers and streams in a day, going into the river and doing something called a kick sample to collect the river sediments in a net.  I do this wearing waders, a life jacket and other safety equipment and only when the rivers are not too high.

    • What I'd do with the prize money:

      I would love to run an engagement session with local schools.  I would focus on showing pupils the bugs that live in rivers and how we can tell if the water is clean or not using those.

    CV

    • Education:

      Northfield Academy – Aberdeen.

      The University of Aberdeen- BSc Hons in Zoology

      The University of Birmingham – PGDip in Biological Recording

      The University of Birmingham – PhD in Ecology

      Canterbury Christ Church University – PGCert in Science Education

    • Qualifications:

      8 Standard Grades

      6 Highers

      1 Advanced Higher

      BSc Hons Zoology

      PGDip in Biological Recording

      PhD in Ecology

      PGCert in Science Education

    • Work History:

      My first job was working in a hospital dining room in the summer between school and starting university, then when I was at university I had a part-time job working in a supermarket and then a science museum.

      Once I left university, jobs were hard to come across, I had a few temporary jobs, working as a science technician in a school, working as a scientist in a fishmeal factory (that was smelly!), working for SEPA where I am now as an assistant ecologist, back to a supermarket for a while and then at Marine Scotland as a lab scientist.  I then decided to do a PhD as the prospect of being paid for 3.5 years of research was a good option compared to all the short contracts I was finding.

      After my PhD ecology jobs were still hard to come across so I decided to retrain as a science teacher and worked doing that for 7 years before deciding to return to ecology.

    • Current Job:

      I am an ecologist at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), where I mostly work with freshwaters – rivers and lakes, looking at what lives in them to decide if they are polluted or not.

       

      I have skills in invertebrate taxonomy – that means looking at bugs under microscopes and using keys to identify what they are.

       

      Other things I do:  write reports about my findings, identify plants in rivers, read planning applications for things like wind turbines and give ecological advice on them, fieldwork and other lab analyses.

    • Employer:

      Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), this is a government agency in charge of protecting Scotland’s environment.

    • My Interview

      • What did you want to be after you left school?

        A zoologist or archeologist

        Were you ever in trouble at school?

        I got one detention in school for forgetting my english homework..oops! But I was mostly quiet and nerdy.

        If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?

        My current obsession is growing food, so probably a gardener or crop scientist

        Who is your favourite singer or band?

        I am a pop-punk fan so probably New Found Glory or Neck Deep

        What's your favourite food?

        Any chicken and rice dish, especially curry

        If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!

        I would wish for more free time, to stop aging so I can play outside in rivers forever and to never have to do fieldwork when it is colder than 10 degrees

Questions answered by Caroline

No questions to show