• Question: What type of scientist are you? What are you specialised in?

    Asked by Isaac on 5 Jun 2023. This question was also asked by face487rat.
    • Photo: Kathleen Duffin

      Kathleen Duffin answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I am a paediatrician (children’s doctor) and reproductive biologist (I study the bits of the body that make people able to have babies). Putting these together – when children get cancer, we have lots of really good treatments that can defeat the cancer and help the children survive. But the bad news is, these treatments can also attack healthy bits of the body, causing side effects. One of the problems is that children treated for cancer sometimes can’t go on to have children of their own when they grow up. So I’m studying this and trying to find ways to help children being treated for cancer to become parents one day, if that is what they want to do!

    • Photo: Ana Vitlic

      Ana Vitlic answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I am immunologist – cancer immunologist which means I am finding the way in which our immune system (consisting of white blood cells that are there to protect us from anything bad such as bacteria, virus and cancer of course) can be better programmed to fight cancer.

    • Photo: Adelaide Young

      Adelaide Young answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I work on Melanoma, but I would say that I am a molecular biologist as I use techniques that look at DNA, RNA and proteins to understand mechanisms behind cancer cell behaviours. Hopefully by understanding how cancer cells function we can develop better therapies to target them.

    • Photo: Jen Antrobus

      Jen Antrobus answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I’m a radiobiologist, which means I look at the effects that radiotherapy (which is used to treat cancer) has on our cells. Mainly, I look at ways we can make radiotherapy have less nasty side effects and kill cancer cells more effectively.

    • Photo: Kehinde Ross

      Kehinde Ross answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I am interested in using RNA to help treat cancer. We collaborate to develop nanoparticles to carry synthetic RNA into cancer cells.

    • Photo: Giampiero Valenzano

      Giampiero Valenzano answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I am a cancer immunologist, so I research how cells that normally fight the bugs that give us the flu, (or covid) can be used to fight cancer, as an alternative to the common cancer treatments like chemo or radiotherapy

    • Photo: Tammy Piper

      Tammy Piper answered on 6 Jun 2023:

      I’m a biomedical scientist specializing on histology (tissues) and cytology (cells). Biomedical scientists work in the NHS in pathology labs testing patient samples. They can specialist in blood sciences, immunology, biochemistry, microbiology, virology. molecular genetics and histology and cytology (known as Cellular pathology)

    • Photo: Amy McLuskie

      Amy McLuskie answered on 6 Jun 2023:

      I am a Dietitian so specialise in nutrition, the human body and what we would refer to as ‘therapeutic treatment of disease through nutrition’. This could be diabetes, Coeliac disease, Crohn’s disease, food allergies and intolerances, cancer, strokes to name a few! I am also working as a researcher looking at the benefits of rehabilitation (nutrition, exercise, physical activity) in those with a life limiting illness.

    • Photo: Jean Ling Tan

      Jean Ling Tan answered on 7 Jun 2023:

      My work is in ovarian cancer and I would consider myself more as a cell biologist. I study the role of the cell cycle in patient response to chemotherapy and how we can try to improve that response. From there, we can identify patients who could benefit from having targeted therapy to improve chemotherapy response.

    • Photo: Zahra Rattray

      Zahra Rattray answered on 7 Jun 2023:

      I am a pharmaceutical scientist, but because of my clinical training have been working across two areas of drug discovery- first of all developing new medicines on the nanoscale (nanoparticles, antibodies, etc) and secondly testing how they perform in biological systems and the body, including how cancers develop resistance to drug treatments.

    • Photo: Duncan Smith

      Duncan Smith answered on 16 Jun 2023:

      I am a protein biochemist with a specialty in Mass Spectrometry. We use this technology to analyse proteins, the way they change in abundance or the way they are modified in relation to the processes key to disease.

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