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The cornea is the clear bit at the very front of your eye. It’s special because it is the only piece of tissue in the entire body that is transparent. It is almost entirely made of strands of collagen, woven together like strings to make a rope. These different fibres then have to be arranged in an exact way so that they let the light through. My project is basically to find out how much this arrangement can be changed and still leave you with a transparent cornea.

My day would usually begin with answering e-mails and reading research articles. Then what happens depends on what part of my project I’m working on. I test pieces of cornea using high-energy X-rays (this is done at the Diamond synchrotron, which is a big electron accelerator in Didcot, Oxfordshire), an electron microscope and by dissolving them with enzymes and looking at the cells under a light microscope and measuring their features.