Browse our interviews

While doing a PhD in Pharmacology at King’s College London (KCL), Maria Fernandes seized a number of opportunities – setting up the KCL Pharmacological Society, organising events and sitting on committees – to gain enough experience to move into a career outside of research. She is now the Professional Development Manager at the Microbiology Society.

On reading that the 21st century would be known as the century of biology, mechanical engineering graduate Lining (Arnold) Ju decided to pursue a PhD in biomedical engineering. He is currently a postdoc at the Heart Research Institute and a lecturer at the University of Sydney in Australia, where he studies how platelets sense mechanical forces and how problems in this process can lead to various blood diseases.

Zach Cofran's career as a paleoanthropologist has taken him from the United States to Kazakhstan and South Africa, where he was part of the team that discovered the new hominin species, Homo naledi. He has just started a new job as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College, New York.

Growing up on a game ranch in Zimbabwe stimulated Ben Price’s fascination with insects – “the sheer diversity of insects makes it impossible to not be interested once you start looking”. He continued to explore nature during a PhD on the evolutionary history of cicadas, and two postdocs. Now, he is the senior curator of Odonata and Small Orders, an eclectic group that includes land-based and aquatic insects, at the Natural History Museum in London.

For many years plant scientist Monica Alandete-Saez assumed that she would spend her whole career in academic research, but a desire to interact more directly with other sectors of society led her to explore other options. She now works for PIPRA, a small not-for-profit technology commercialization organization based on the campus of the University of California Davis.

After six enjoyable years as a PhD student and postdoc studying the breeding behaviours of banded mongooses in Uganda, Jenni Sanderson felt the urge to move into a career where she could do “something useful”. She currently teaches science at a secondary school in Bristol in the UK.

Ramanath Hegde is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Protein Biochemistry in Naples, Italy, where he investigates ways of preventing cells from destroying mutant proteins. He maintains his original interest in engineering through a variety of hobbies, including carpentry.

Alicia Rosello grew up in Brussels and is now studying a PhD at University College London funded by Public Health England researching antibiotic resistance in care homes for the elderly. She has also worked on studying Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Daniel Abankwa is approaching the end of a five-year Academy of Finland Research Fellowship at the Turku Centre for Biotechnology in Finland. His group investigates how mutations to a protein called Ras can lead to cancer, and use this knowledge to develop drugs.

Antonia Marín-Burgin is a Group Leader at the IBioBA-CONICET-MPSP Institute in Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on understanding how the neurons in the hippocampus – an area of the brain associated with navigation and memory formation – interact to form microcircuits.