Profile

As a kid, I didn’t really have a specific career dream in science. After secondary school, I thought about becoming a primary school teacher. I did well in my favorite subjects – biology, chemistry, and maths – so I continued to sixth form. Surprisingly, I excelled in A-levels, and with some encouragement from my chemistry teacher, I became the first in my family to go to university.

Beyond science, I enjoy various crafts, especially knitting, and have a soft spot for 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’s a bit like a super-long adventure where teams of researchers spend years creating thousands of compounds on different projects. But guess what? It might take decades before they discover just one that could become a new medicine for everyone!

I start my day by working on my projects and checking for any new data. I analyze what’s new and build computational models to predict which compounds will be best for synthetic chemists to make next. Throughout the day, I have several meetings to discuss results and plans, and I prepare for these by creating presentations of my work.

I also spend time looking at the structures of proteins, including enzymes, to design drug compounds that might connect with them and change how the proteins work. I often work with large data sets to find trends. What I love about my job is that no two days are the same, and I almost always learn something new, making each day exciting and never boring!