Profile

I live in Macclesfield with my husband, 2 daughters and 2 guinea pigs named Rainbow and Sparkle (named by my 6 y old!). When I have time to myself (that doesn’t happen often!) I like to read, crochet, sew and upcycle things. As a family we love to be outdoors and go camping, grow fruit and veg at the allotment and go walking and adventuring. We also love a Disney film and pizza night 🙂

I try to live as sustainably as possible, making small everyday changes to reduce our carbon imprint – although I have a long way to go! I don’t have an electric car and can’t quite give up on burgers and bacon sandwiches 🙂

I work for AstraZeneca in a department called pharmaceutical development. Our job as a department is to take an idea of a medicine that has shown some potential of working into a medicine that is on the shelf for everyone to use when needed. We mostly work on medicines for cancer at Macclesfield.

Currently my specific job is to store a medicine at high temperatures and humidities and use that information to help to choose the packaging that the medicine is stored in (e.g. a bottle, blister packets…) and also for how long and where (cupboard at room temperature, fridge…)

To do this I sometimes use automation to make things much easier and I have more time to look at the results and not preparing samples.

I start at about 10am, after dropping my daughters off where they need to be. I will check on any experiments from the previous day if required and then read through any emails or talk to colleagues about anything urgent that may be needed that day.

I will eat lunch at my laptop so I can leave work earlier in the evening to spend time with my family.

If at work I spend the afternoon in the lab, preparing samples and preparing instruments to run those samples.

If I have no lab work to do I will stay at my laptop whilst writing reports, writing up experiments, checking other peoples work or looking at data and making decisions for that project. We also have a few meetings a week through microsoft teams (a bit like Zoom) so I can talk to colleagues and we can show each other what we have been working on.