What is your role?

My role as a tissue bank manager is to facilitate the collection, processing and archiving of thousands of breast cancer tissue samples from patients enrolled in worldwide breast cancer clinical trials. This involves liaising with sites to arrange shipment, logging the samples, processing them to make derivatives such as stained slides, extracted RNA or DNA and constructing tissue-micro-arrays. We then store the samples until the analysis stage where we ship them to our collaborators. I also attend monthly meetings for each of our trials and produce reports and to make sure all our work is done to regulations. We currently have samples for over 10,000 patients in different trials, which takes up a lot of cupboard space!

What do you most enjoy about your role?

It is always evolving. When I started for the group in 2006, I had recently qualified as a biomedical scientist so mostly did routine histology lab work. Since then, I have learnt various specialist staining techniques, new microscopy methods,  and am now involved in automated image analysis of our trial samples using different computer software.  We are now looking at ways to apply new research methods to historic trial cohorts from 35 years ago as there is a wealth of follow-up data available and the tissues were not analysed at the time.

Why did you get involved in I’m a Scientist and what did you enjoy most about it?

Due to the nature of our work, I rarely get to interact with the public. I usually man a wee pathology stand at the IGMM Doors Open Day, where I have a couple of microscopes and some slides with different tissues on. Seeing people’s reactions to seeing a heart cell or brain cell is amazing. I feel it is important for everybody to be able to engage with science, particularly the health and environmental sciences, as these things impact our day to day lives. Due to the pandemic our Doors Open Day went online. Doing I’m a Scientist gave me a chance to interact with a different audience and challenged me to really think about how to answer the questions at an appropriate level but also with a word limit. I hope by speaking to the students they realised that not everyone in science has or needs a PhD to be a scientist and that you can take many roads to get there.

What is your favourite pastime?

I love going to the beach and rock-pooling but with current restrictions, I’m mostly listening to podcasts and knitting.

I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out Of Here! is an online, student-led STEM enrichment activity. It connects school students with scientists through energetic real-time text based chats.

Find out more about I’m a Scientist

A version of this post first appeared in the December 2020 edition of Scope, the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine Newsletter