The LMB was thrilled to welcome back three alumnae to discuss where their careers have taken them since leaving the LMB. The speakers, Sarah Burge, Jillian Barlow and Claudia Ferreira, shared the successes and challenges they’ve faced, and offered advice to those considering similar paths. The ‘What Next for Your Career’ event was run with the Cambridge Association for Women in Science and Engineering (CamAWiSE) and introduced by Chair Agnieska Rutkowska who praised the strong relationship the organisation has had with the LMB for over two decades.
First, Sarah Burge covered her journey from the lab bench to building a new cancer hospital. Her career began with PhD studies alongside Alan Fersht at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (with close ties to the LMB). Sarah then pursued a computational track and held positions at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Wellcome Sanger Centre and a job share at the Babraham Institute; the flexibility of the latter was integral to help her manage a challenging period in her personal life. These positions also taught Sarah how to recognise what she was looking for in a workplace, and she moved to Cancer Research UK (CRUK) to work on renal cancer treatment trials for chemotherapy patients.
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed Sarah’s work, cancelling her clinical trials and forcing her to refocus on the virus. Though a difficult time, Sarah helped get a new clinical trial underway in just nine days. This also allowed Sarah to demonstrate her skills at scale and meet several people she would never have worked with under different circumstances. In her current position as Director of Clinical Integration at CRUK, Sarah is an intrinsic part of the £400 million project to design and build a cancer research hospital in Cambridge. Specifically, she is working to design patient pathways to best integrate and amplify research opportunities throughout the hospital.
In her closing remarks, Sarah encouraged the audience not to “underestimate the power of mentorship and patronage” and paid tribute to the strong support her partner provides, allowing her the freedom to excel at work.
Next, Jillian Barlow summarised her career in research, which began when she joined the LMB’s PNAC Division in 2003 to complete a PhD in Andrew McKenzie’s group, where she remained as a Career Development Fellow and later an Investigator Scientist. She candidly shared that generating lots of negative results in her experiments made her PhD experience very challenging and it took several years to publish her first research article. However, she successfully built in vivo models for allergic asthma and credits the period for the “transformative opportunity to start teaching lectures and tutorials at the University of Cambridge.” Additionally, a postdoctoral placement working at MRC Technology (now LifeArc) gave her valuable experience in working in industry, with opportunities to work with patent lawyers and commercialisation teams.
In 2019, Jillian moved to the University of York, where she still works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biology. Though initially a daunting move, Jillian has relished the research freedom the position affords her and enjoys the time she now gets to dedicate to teaching.
Moving away from Cambridge also gave Jillian the impetus to found GenerationResearch, a charity committed to improving access to science, which she remains Director of. The mission is personal to Jillian, who was the first in her family to attend university and had no direct connections to researchers at the outset of her career. Her organisation funds placements for talented undergraduate and master’s students in a variety of research and technical settings, including through a partnership with the LMB.
Finally, Claudia Ferreira joined remotely, sharing she was inspired to begin a career in science following a childhood curiosity about how life works. After studying microbiology at the University of Lisbon, she was faced with a choice to either accept a scholarship for a PhD position in London, or a three-month placement at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics. Following her gut, she chose the latter, which ultimately led her to her PhD position in Sean Munro’s group in the LMB’s Cell Biology Division. She described her PhD studies as “full of ups and downs but definitely formative,” and went on to remain at the LMB as an Investigator Scientist and a Career Development Fellow.
When considering the next step in her career, Claudia examined her experiences thus far to identify what personally brings her joy. She concluded that she is a goal-oriented person, rather than a process-oriented person, and this pushed her to move away from experimental work. Consequently, she moved to CMR Surgical where she is now a Portfolio Manager overseeing Digital, Vision and System, a core aspect of the company’s remit to produce robot-assisted surgical devices.
Further references
Cambridge AWiSE
Diverse career stories at the fifteenth LMB-Cambridge AWiSE event