I am originally from Doncaster, a small mining town in the north of England. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Durham and my PhD at the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University. I then started as a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State and after a year, the group moved to Harvard. The topic of my previous and current work is on interacting transients, their diversity and progenitors. Chief among these are the type IIn supernovae which are core-collapse events entombed in hydrogen rich material shed by the progenitor star in its dying breaths.  I use large samples from transient surveys to link together various properties that may provide clues to what stars may explode in this way, such as their light curves, spectroscopy, host galaxy properties and parameters from modeling. Future surveys will produce enormous samples of these relatively rare transients, promising exciting opportunities in the next few years.