Profile
Judy Bettridge
-
About Me:
I’m a single mum living in Kent with my daughter and two cats. I love singing and being outdoors – walking, swimming, cycling or gardening. I also like all kinds of creative hobbies. I took up knitting last year and have so far managed four hats and a cardigan!
-
Read more
I’ve moved around quite a lot in recent years. I spent about 15 years in the northwest of England, and sang with a wonderful choir in Manchester. I also used to visit north Wales a lot for walking or climbing.
I moved out to Kenya in 2015 and my daughter was born out there. I came back to England in 2018, but couldn’t get another job in the north, so lived in Surrey for about 18 months, and then moved to Kent at the beginning of last year, just before the lockdown started. So I haven’t been able to join a choir here, and am still exploring the area to find the best spots for outdoor activities. There are some nice beaches, which both my daughter and I enjoy, but she’s not really into walking yet – she’d rather go to the park or the woods where she can climb and swing.
I enjoy various crafty-type hobbies. I’ve drawn and sewn since I was a teenager, and have tried things like calligraphy, glass painting, pyrography, cross-stitch, tapestry, embroidery, patchwork and quilting. I have a lot of homemade cushions! I also did all the invitations for my brother’s wedding a few years ago, which I really enjoyed.
It’s quite hard to get out in the evenings when you are a single parent, but I have started playing boardgames over Zoom, and doing more jigsaws and crosswords. Otherwise, it’s mostly knitting in front of the TV once my daughter is asleep.
-
Read more
I’m a veterinary epidemiologist – I look for patterns in cases of animal diseases to try and explain when, where and why they occur. There are lots of reasons why we might be interested in this information. Sometimes it’s because we are concerned about zoonotic diseases – that is, ones that can pass from animals to humans – and want to know how to reduce the risk of this happening. Sometimes it’s because the diseases harm animal welfare, or cause a lot of economic losses to farmers.
I have worked with several different diseases and animal species. The details change, but the methods and principles are the same. The work is more challenging (and interesting!) when you have a disease that can infect lots of different animals species, or if you look for multiple infections at the same time, because different infections can interact and affect the body’s response.
-
My Typical Day:
I don’t really have a “typical” day. Mostly, at the moment, I work from home. After dropping off my daughter, I work on my computer to analyse data. Some days I have meetings, or teach students about statistics. Now and then, I visit farms to collect samples, or help with the laboratory work to test the samples for diseases.
-
Read more
Typically, a project will have various phases, and what I do with my day will depend on where in the project we are. A project can last anything from a few weeks to several years, and as I have become more experienced, I now normally work on several projects at the same time. As each of them will be at a different stage, my life sometimes feels like a bit of a juggling act, but I really enjoy the variety this brings to my work.
The beginning of a project is lots of planning – things like designing questionnaires or forms to collect information, or checking that we have everything in place to run the project smoothly, and that everyone is trained. We have to be prepared to deal with possible risks when working with people and animals in the field or to work with infectious samples in the laboratory. Recruiting people to participate in projects can sometimes take a lot of time, as well.
The fieldwork phase is my favourite – I love doing the hands-on work to collect samples from animals, and chatting to farmers about their business and the problems they face. It can be quite intensive, with long days, early starts and a lot of travelling, and you often have to be flexible and able to rearrange schedules for a whole team at a moment’s notice.
Once we have samples, they come back to the laboratory to be tested. Usually, I leave this to the experts, although it’s useful for me to understand how the tests work, or to be able to fill in for someone who is absent, so I always try to learn about the test process.
Analysing the data can take a long time with some of the complex projects I have worked on. I mostly use a software called R – it’s free and can do all kinds of things, but you need to learn some programming language. I use it to make maps, models or graphs to show the data patterns. I also have to write reports or scientific papers to explain what we find.
-
What I'd do with the prize money:
I once did a stall in the Science Garden at the Green Man Festival, where we combined some craft activities with talking to the festival-goers about our research. I’d love to do something similar again.
-
Education:
Beaumont School
University of Liverpool
-
Qualifications:
GCSEs (English, English Literature, Maths, Double Science, Technology, Music, Religious studies, French, German, Latin)
A-levels (Biology, Chemistry, Maths with Statistics, German)
BVSc (Veterinary Science)
MSc (Veterinary Infection and Disease Control)
PhD (Veterinary Epidemiology)
-
Work History:
When I finished university, I worked in a small animal vet clinic in Liverpool for a couple of years, then moved to another vet hospital in Manchester. After working for five years, I decided I wanted to do something a bit different, so I went back to university to do my Masters degree, and was then offered a place on the PhD programme.
For my PhD research, I studied diseases in chickens in Ethiopia. People there mostly only have very few chickens that they keep as a kind of savings account – something they can sell quickly if they need money for school or the doctor, or similar. The problem is that a lot of the chickens die quite often, so people lose all their savings, so we wanted to find out which diseases were the most important, and what kind of solutions might work to improve disease management.
After I finished my PhD, I took a job in Kenya. It was originally for twelve months, but I ended up staying for three years. We looked at a bacteria called E. coli, which most animals (including humans) carry quite harmlessly in their gut. We wanted to find out how often bacteria can pass from wildlife into humans, and whether keeping particular types of animals, such as cows, pigs or poultry, might make you more at risk, as the livestock could act as a “bridge” for bacteria to pass from wildlife into humans. We also studied antibiotic resistance patterns in the humans, livestock and wildlife.
When my job in Kenya ended, I came back to the UK and worked for the civil service for a while. I worked on various projects, including trialing a vaccine for Salmonella in pigs, monitoring antibiotic resistance, and looking at ways to use new methods of genetic testing for bacteria to improve disease detection in animals in the UK.
-
My Interview
-
How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
chocoholic epidemiologist mum
What did you want to be after you left school?
A vet
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Only up until the age of about 11. After that, I was too interested in learning new stuff
Who is your favourite singer or band?
I have quite varied tastes in music, but if I had to choose one, probably Fleetwood Mac
What's your favourite food?
Chocolate
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
For myself, I'd like enough money to a) buy a house and b) employ someone to do the housework. I'd also love it if my cat could live another 40 years.
Tell us a joke.
What kind of dog can do magic tricks? A Labracadabrador!
-