 So, I'm Aistess Taponeanete and I'm a lecturer at Meru School of Pharmacy in Anson Building just in here. So, I'm a circadian researcher, I did my PhD on circadian neuroscience, then I did a couple of years of post-doc as well in the neuroscience field in circadian rhythms and now I just started my lectureship. What is a circadian rhythm? It's your natural internal mechanism, your internal clock. It takes on a 24-hour cycle and it's needed for your body to adjust to the environment to make sure your body is a synchrony with the environment. How does it work? So, there are several factors that can affect it and light is one of the most important ones. It has the strongest signaling that tells exactly directly to your brain that this is the daytime and it helps to synchronize from your brain to the rest of the body organs to say that this is the daytime. If there is no light available, you can still synchronize your circadian rhythms through exercising, by timed meals for example and you will still be able to maintain your rhythms. I still, I feel like I'm being watched. Oh, you are. Why do you have an eye and a brain on the table? So these are the essential components for your circadian rhythms and sleep. The way we see the world around us is through the photoreceptors. So the back of the eye, we have photoreceptors that help us to see the environment, see the light. This is not exactly what is telling our circadian clock about the environment we are in. So there is a third type of photoreceptors that send directly to your brain the information about the light surrounding us and in particular it's the blue light that activates the circadian clock. The nerve leaving the eye gets straight into the brain where it crosses and at this dot in here just a couple millimeters in size is your key circadian clock of your whole body. This is what controls the circadian rhythms for your whole body. This is the key point and why is that significant? Through the light the circadian clock helps us to adjust to the environment and to synchronize our body to the environment. Imagine if you would be in a constant jet lag, you're traveling non-stop and your body is misaligned to the environmental light, you do not feel great. When you're jet lagged, you're sleepy, you might be angry, you might be hungry, the wrong times of the day and this is what would happen if our body would not get synchronized. Where does your work fit in? What are you specifically looking at? Because I'm a neuroscientist, I'm looking very much at the changes inside the circadian clock, the small part in the brain that happen with age. So one tiny component changing throughout your life can affect your entire circadian rhythm as you age and this is what I'm looking at. This is such a complex mechanism that a lot of changes involve throughout your life and even across individuals. So in my research I'm just looking at a particular protein that changes with age and it can affect to the loss of sleep when you get older. It's funny because teenagers seem to need a lot of sleep whereas the older you get the less quality of sleep you get. As you age the circadian clock changes and for the older people they tend to go to sleep earlier, they wake up earlier, they cannot have a full night's sleep and for the teenagers they have slightly delayed clock. So there's something called a chronotype. So a lot of people can be early chronotype, also known as early birds. So people who tend to wake up early, they're late chronotype who prefer to stay awake late in the evening. So teenagers tend to be on the late chronotype side. They like to stay late in the evenings. What's it been like working at the University of Greenwich? I think because of all the support you get around in here, that's why I'm still here. Ten years later. Ten years? Yes. Wow. And are you on this campus specifically? I am. Yes. Because it just seems like such a relaxing place to be. It is. There's so many green spaces, there's Riverneer Bay, the great international community. It's really brilliant. There are a lot of commuting students that come from London, but when everyone and the lecturers and the many interactive people, it's just great to learn so much about other people.