Profile

I was born and went to school in Epsom, Surrey, where I really enjoyed studying all of the sciences. After college in Kingston upon Thames, I went West to the University of Exeter.  On graduating I moved to the East Midlands to take up a position as a medicinal chemist.  I have been married for over 20 years and have one child currently in year 11.  When not at work I enjoy live performance: music and theatre; photography and country walks.

I am a medicinal chemist.  I design new compound, make them in chemical reactions, purify, characterise to prove I have made what I wanted.  These then become feedstocks for further reactions, it can take several cycles of chemical reactions to deliver the designed compound. Ultimately the compounds are tested by biologists to see if they would make good drugs to treat or cure disease.  The results of those tests inform me of changes to make, in order to make a better compound next time.

Drug discovery and development involves a lot of skilled scientists. Some of the many roles: computational chemists, biologists, robotics engineers, organic chemists, analytical chemists, pharmacologists, chemical engineers, and many more to bring a new drug to market, to treat patients.

Every day of the week my body clock wakes me at 06.30, even on the weekend!  When I get to the laboratory, I am excited to see if my reactions have worked overnight.  I run thin layer chromatography or HPLC analysis attached to a mass spectrometer to look at the experimental reactions I had left running from the previous day. I assess if they have given me: no product; some product or full product.  This will then instruct how I plan the rest of the day: start over with new reaction conditions; add more reagents or tweak reaction conditions to push the reaction to completion or work up and purify the new compound.  Once isolated, I will then analyse the material by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and mass spectroscopy to prove I have made the material, as designed.

The next set of reactions can then be set up, any new biology results looked at and discussed with the team to decide on the changes we need to make.  Then we can decide on the synthetic route and then source the chemicals required.