I’m Florrie, I am an exchange student from New Zealand. My university in NZ is called Victoria University of Wellington. I am doing a whole year here in Southampton. I study Biomedical Science and am in my final year. Although I live in NZ I am originally from the UK, I moved to NZ when I was 5 years old. I have also lived in Sydney, Australia. I live in Wellington, which is the capital city. New Zealand is a beautiful country, it has a similar land mass to UK but only has a population of 5 million. One of the coolest things about New Zealand is that we have serval active volcanoes. I have attached a video below of things to do in New Zealand.

The topic I am most excited about in this module is stem cells and research ethics. I am looking forward to learning about how stem cells can be used to help cure diseases and aid in medicine. It will be interesting to learn about how ethics affect the work that can be done and how they are used in regulating research. I have done some lab work with Henrietta lacks cells back at my uni at home which was really interesting seeing how they develop depending on what chemical they are exposed to. It was also comparing the growth of cancerous stem cells to normal ones.