You trained as a vet? So how did a vet become a virologist?

It was during my veterinary training that I again came up against the issues of disease. 60% of human diseases come from animals – zoonotic infections. When I was studying veterinary medicine, there was a large outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza, which turned out to be zoonotic. I wanted to understand how these viruses jump from animal to human, which is why I went back to study for my Master's in Microbiology.

I did well enough in my Master's that I got a scholarship to go and study at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden. I started exploring how influenza had jumped from animals to humans, and I made seminal contributions to the understanding of zoonotic transmission.

Your research area is viruses. Can you speak a bit about viruses and vaccines?

If you think about vaccines for a moment, think about where we’ve come from: With Edward Jenner taking pustules from the teats of a cow and basically just injecting that into children, to today, where in ten months we’ve developed a vaccine that is 90% effective against this novel coronavirus. This didn’t just happen over the ten months of the pandemic, rather it began a hundred years ago with Edward Jenner.

The real problem is that anti-viral drugs are very difficult to come by because of the way viruses hijack our own immune system and cellular machinery. We can’t target our own cells to disadvantage the virus. We need vaccines because we don’t have other approaches. They are the most powerful approaches we have to combat and ultimately eradicate viral disease. And we do have very successful vaccines against coronaviruses in animals, in poultry and livestock, for example. That translational information really helped in determining what would work in this instance. That’s where I come in: Translating veterinary knowledge into humans.

For viruses, the key is really understanding the way they cause disease. First, we need to understand how the enemy operates, then we will be able to counteract.

What would you say to someone at secondary school thinking about pursuing science as a career?

Look for the questions. Try to find the answers around your own environment. There are so many questions in public health that still need answering. It’s not about answering questions related to someone else, it’s always answering questions that are related to you.

Studying science isn’t studying something else, it is studying yourself. We are an integral part of the science of public health, or medicine, or global health. You have an opportunity to study yourself – where do you stand in the environment? What are the risks being posed to humanity? What can you do to help?

Every project that I’ve done, they don’t really finish, they lead to new questions. That’s the beauty of a career in science; every day is a new day. The more you explore, the more pathways you find to explore further.

I want to encourage our young people to come into Biomedicine. The pandemic has highlighted just how important public health is.

You could work anywhere in the world. What makes Lancaster special?

I came to Lancaster from the Pirbright Institute where I was researching viruses under a (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) BBSRC Fellowship. I was there for five years purely conducting research, but I wanted the opportunity to share my work with future scientists. I wanted to inspire future researchers; people to carry on my research.

I am the only virologist in the department. I exclusively teach virology. Inspiring students from my research labs.

I currently teach undergraduates in their first term of year one. It’s inspiring for me; to give them the opportunity to ask questions and to help them find the answers.

At Lancaster there is a high level of collegiality – lots of disciplines coming together to answer specific questions in a way that wouldn’t happen in a larger research setting. For example, I work with material scientists on creating antiviral surfaces for use in PPE, or hospitals, on stethoscopes, that kind of thing.

What about your own ambitions?

Every day that I come to the lab, I have new challenges and new ways to answer them. What I want to do is look at the broader picture of public health. What can I do to understand health issues better, and then communicate that, to students, to health bodies, that can ultimately benefit humanity?

How long have you been at Lancaster and where were you before?

I moved from Edinburgh to start my own research group at Lancaster in 2018; a move that enabled me to move my family back to the Lake District where my husband I both grew up.

What is your research area and why does it interest you?

I’m an immunologist - I switched to Immunology the first week of the final year of my undergraduate degree - I had one lecture on immunology as part of a microbiology course and I made the snap decision to switch courses. I’ve been an immunologist ever since. I love how complicated it is and how amazing it is that we have this intricate, unbelievable system of protection within each of us. I marvel every day at the experimental research that has gone before to allow researchers now to be able to design medical interventions such as vaccines, check-point inhibitors and biologics such as anti-TNFα. My laboratory focuses on how immune cells within the linings of our bodies protect us against diseases such as allergy, mesothelioma & peritonitis.

What is it about your work that you love?

I love all of it! I get to ask questions about how the immune system works, design experiments to address those curiosities and then pursue the myriad additional questions that each experiment usually opens up. It’s one massive puzzle whose answers may contribute to improving people’s lives.

Has the route you’ve taken to become an academic been straightforward?

No, it hasn't. I originally ‘failed’ my A levels in that my grades were not good enough to do the degree I wanted to do, so I re-sat the whole year and passed second time around. Because I knew what I wanted to do (study animals in Africa), I was determined to not let that stop me. I would say to anyone in the same position, if you really want it, find a way.

How long have you been at Lancaster and where were you before?

I have now been in Lancaster nearly 17 years. Before that, I was a lecturer at the University of Stirling I Scotland for 7 years.

What is your research area and why does it interest you?

I am interested in insects and their diseases, and it interests me because it allows me to address fundamental questions in ecology and evolution, as well as more applied questions such as how we can harness insect diseases to control crop pests.

What is it about your work that you love?

The freedom to teach and research whatever interests me (more or less).

What brought you to Lancaster?

The department secured funding from North West Cancer Research (NWCR) to employ a lecturer and I applied and got it.

I already knew about NWCR and had projects at Liverpool University funded by them and it gave me the opportunity to have my own research group which was very appealing.

What does a typical day in your lab look like?

My team and I are working on new methods to specifically treat hard to treat cancers. A lot of cancers now, because of developments and research, have good treatments but some cancers, like triple negative breast cancer, still really lack targeted treatments so that is our focus.

We are a cancer cell biology lab working with cell culture models of cancers and so we grow those cells and then we either manipulate them to find out the function of the gene or a protein and see what happens or we treat them with a drug we think may help prevent their growth.

A typical day may start in our cell culture lab where we grow and treat these cells. One of our main outputs is to image those cells so we look at them down a microscope to see how they’ve changed in response to a treatment we’ve applied to them.

Can you tell us about some of the real world impacts your work has had.

To begin with, a lot of my research was in cell biology models and that will impact through in various ways. For example, in Vancouver we did a drug screen for drugs that would interfere with cancer cell growth and this work identified some pathways and drugs that would target specific cancer types.

At present I have a couple of ongoing projects.

My team and I are trying to discover pathways that specifically inhibit the growth of triple negative breast cancer cells, and we have found some so we now have a project to try and develop novel drugs, so moving from pure biology to drug development.

My other project is in collaboration with a research group at Liverpool University. Every year a few hundred people in the UK are diagnosed with uveal melanoma, a rare type of eye cancer. Half of all patients with this cancer are treated at Liverpool University, as it's a centre for excellence with a group dedicated to oncology, patient care and research into better treatments.

What exactly is triple negative breast cancer?

There are four main sub types of breast cancer, three of them have good targeted therapies but the other, triple negative, does not. About 15% of people who develop breast cancer have the triple negative subtype and there are currently no targeted therapies, so my work explores ways to inhibit the growth of this cancer type

What would you say to a young person considering a life in science?

Pursue what you’re interested in and what you enjoy. Keep an open mind early on and as your interests develop look out for opportunities to get involved in those areas.