Every day below ground is a great day, remember that
Kayleigh has been working at Boulby Underground Laboratory as a Laboratory Technician Apprentice for around six months now. We caught up with her to find out what she’s making of her STFC apprenticeship so far, and what has surprised her about working in such a unique research environment.
Kayleigh, Laboratory Technician Apprentice, in Boulby Underground Laboratory's surface cleanroom.
Would you mind telling us a little about yourself?
I’m Kayleigh, from a little place called Lewes in the South East of England, and I’ve just hit my 6 months of working as a Laboratory Technician Apprentice at Boulby Underground Laboratory, the UK’s deep underground research lab in a mine in North Yorkshire. I moved all the way from my hometown and to the North for the position as I couldn’t see myself missing such a cool opportunity!
When I’m not yearning for the mines, you can find me working on crafting projects, rollerskating or delving into some new and obscure hobby every other week.
What were your first thoughts when you applied to work at Boulby Underground Laboratory?
Bizarrely, I hadn’t heard of Boulby Underground Laboratory before until I was looking for science research apprenticeships. So as I read through the job description and began researching the lab, sentences were popping out at me such as working 1.1km underground in a mine, operating particle detectors, and searching for dark matter! How could I possibly refuse? It was lining up with everything I wanted to be doing for both my professional and personal development, and to be honest, also just sounded incredibly cool. But even though I was imagining what it might be like to be working underground, it’s impossible to really understand until you’ve gone to see it all for yourself. What a cool place I get to talk about at family dinners!
Kayleigh at a public engagement event, describing the different types of rock found in the mine.
In the Outside Experimentation Area.
Can you describe a typical day as an apprentice at Boulby Underground Laboratory?
You might think that working in a laboratory requires routine or repetitive work, but with the wide range of science projects happening at Boulby Lab, no day is truly the same. First, I’ll have to decide if I’m doing work in the underground lab for the day or work in the surface lab. You only pick one, because you’ll need to leg it for the 9am lift down and it waits for no one.
In our surface cleanroom my main project is the ICP-MS, an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. Here I screen materials to detect traces of uranium and thorium which are a nuisance to highly sensitive particle detectors as they radioactively decay into other elements. But we can effectively screen for anything to see what elements it’s made of. A typical day here can look like completing calibration runs to test our sensitive detection limits, analysing a sample by creating a digestion using concentrated acid and using all the different instruments to break it down into a liquid, and maintaining our ISO 5 cleanroom standards (we do a lot of cleaning!).
Underground, I’ve been learning about the electroforming project and helping out with some of the installation (which involves a lot of cleaning). The eventual plan is to grow a copper sphere for a spherical dark matter detector with the coolest name, DarkSPHERE. Running the laboratory is a collaborative effort, so I have helped with elements of the BUTTON antineutrino detector installation and our outreach programme, participating in live-links from the underground lab. Every day below ground is a great day, remember that.
Have there been any unique opportunities since you started at Boulby Lab that you wouldn’t have got elsewhere?
The opportunity to work in the UK’s only underground laboratory and flush the UK’s deepest toilet! Definitely won’t find that anywhere else in UK, and it provides the chance to work alongside world leading projects. I’ve learned how to run an ISO 5 cleanroom and conduct material screening on some of the most sensitive equipment available. Here we are screening materials for the next generation of dark matter detectors, such as XLZD! There are many fantastic challenges to overcome and opportunities to learn, as well as being able to take your own initiative and make your own independent decisions. This has been amazing for both personal and professional growth and I get to see the value of my work every day.
Kayleigh pipetting in the surface cleanroom.
Representing Boulby Underground Laboratory at a local college's careers event.
If you could give advice to someone considering an apprenticeship at Boulby Underground Laboratory, what would you tell them?
I’ve done quite a few outreach events now where I’ve been asked about our apprenticeships by interested people, and I always tend to say the same thing; it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made! And it’s also not just for scientists. Sure, it’s a science lab, but it takes a lot of different people, skillsets and backgrounds to run. We have an amazing diverse team that are so willing to help you grow, develop and reach your goals!
Article by Kayleigh Johnson and Jonathan Gutteridge. 11/06/2025.
