Profile

My Dad was in the army when I was a child so we moved around a lot and I went to 8 different schools in 3 different countries so I had to learn to be adaptable which has shaped the person I am today and gave me a lot of skills I use at work.

This gave me the confidence to move to different parts of the country for university and work- I’ve studied/worked in Scotland, North West England, Birmingham and also did a 2 year stint working in California in the USA which was amazing!

I love to be active so I have done a range of sports throughout my life so far- mostly different sports because of all the moving around! Karate has been my primary sport for the last 18 years (I’m a 2nd Dan black belt) but unfortunately I had to retire a few years ago due to injury 🙁 I picked up running just over a year ago and have been enjoying that ever since as part of my local running club and doing Parkrun most Saturday mornings.

The flu vaccine is updated every year because flu is constantly changing making the previous years version of the vaccine less effective. Every February the World Health Organisation tell us what versions of flu we need to make for our vaccine that year- once the starter material is made, it is inoculated (injected) into thousands of eggs to produce lots of virus with is then extracted, inactivated (to make it safe for injection into people) and is purified (cleaned up) before being combined with other ingredients to make the final vaccine.

To support the yearly vaccine update the team I work in coordinates and conducts a range of tests to confirm the new vaccine is safe and effective. This then forms a package of information that Regulatory bodies (the government agencies that allow us to sell our vaccine) use to give us approval to release the vaccine for sale.

Throughout the year I run projects to improve the process and use my scientific expertise to determine what experiments we may need to do to understand whether the changes will actually give us an improvement or may actually cause a problem- I design and carry out these experiments and then use statistics to review the data and draw conclusions.

I also provide scientific expertise when something goes wrong or someone needs some technical input on something they are working on. I originally worked in Forensics as a DNA Analysis expert before moving into the vaccine manufacturing industry 5 years ago so I had to learn some new areas of science on the job using my background in general biology and DNA as a base.

I love my job and really enjoy being able to learn something new most days and being able to really dig into the detail of a problem or improvement idea to figure out what’s going on.

I manage my own time and work- I just have a list of things I need to look after or work on and I set my day/week/month activities up based on how I want to do them. The list changes over the year and generally involves big projects or very complicated problems so I have to break them down into small chunks to be able to work through them.

Generally the kind of activities I will do are:

• Researching a topic by doing online searches, reading reports or going to watch a part of the manufacturing process first hand.
• Summarising what I find to make it easy for people to understand- presentations, reports, e-mails.
• Bringing people together for a meeting to discuss a topic or problem.
• Analysis of data.
• Designing experiments to test theories.
• Making sure people are aware of any issues/changes that are happening.
• Coaching and mentoring junior members of staff.