When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Well, there was a time when I wanted to play cricket for England, but when I realised that being totally crap at cricket would probably make that difficult and had to think of an alternative career path, believe it or not I did actually want to be a scientist. I had visions of beavering away in a lab, surrounded by strange coloured things in test tubes, coming up with cures for all sorts of diseases. Strangely enough, although I left my lab career behind me almost 2 decades ago and never really attempted to follow any career path I’d thought about in childhood, my current work as a medical statistician (which I never even imagined being when I was a child) does actually contribute towards curing diseases and so comes remarkably close to what I wanted to be when I grew up
Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?
I’m not sure: it was a long time ago! I have been interested in science for as long as I remember.
What do you love about your job and being a “scientist”?
I enjoy the interactions with my various colleagues and clients. Clinical research is a deeply multidisciplinary activity, and no single person can do it by themselves. I enjoy the team work involved in designing clinical studies when I apply my statistical expertise, medical colleagues apply their medical expertise, and we all work together to come up with a plan that none of us could have done by ourselves. It’s also wonderful, of course, when the results of clinical research represent a genuine breakthrough that has the potential to help real patients in real life, although sadly that doesn’t happen every day.
What would you change?
Perhaps it’s odd for a scientist to want to un-invent anything, but I would be delighted if somehow we could magically be transported to a world where there was no email. It has to be the biggest timewaster ever invented in the whole history of the world.