Profile

As a child I didn’t really have any ambitions to have a career in science.  When I left secondary school I wanted to be a primary school teacher, I got good GCSE grades so I went on sixth form taking my favourite subjects biology, chemistry and maths.  It turned out I did quite well at A-levels too, so with some encouragement from my A-level chemistry teacher, I became the first person in my family to go on to university.

I love most kinds of crafts, especially knitting and love board games and jigsaws.

Medicinal Chemistry is the science that deals with the discovery or design of new therapeutic chemicals and their development into useful medicines.  My work is focused on small organic molecules it involves design of new chemical compounds (using computational techniques) which will make them suitable for therapeutic use (medicines).  Key to this is understanding the structure–activity relationship (SAR) which is the relationship between the chemical structure of a molecule and its biological activity.  It is a long shot and teams of researchers can take decades, and make thousands of compounds, on tens of projects . .  before finding just one that might make it on to the market as a new drug.

I head to the dining room at 8.30 am where my home office is set up.  I check my mail then set about my project work, analysing new data and building computational models to predict which compounds will be best for the synthetic chemists to make next.  I usually have several TEAMS meetings during the day to discuss results and plans, and I will need to prepare for these by preparing powerpoint presentations to present my work.  I will often spend time in my day looking at the structures of proteins (inc enzymes) to design a drug compound that might connect with it and change how the protein works.  At 5.30 pm the computer goes away and family time begins.  I love the fact that no two days and the same and I almost always learn something new, so no day is ever boring.