Voices from the lab

Anthea Monod

I did my undergraduate in pure mathematics, actually. I knew I wanted to do a PhD but at the time, at least at the time in the US, PhD stipends were very, very low. So, after I finished my undergraduate, I took one year off to work as a trader.

I ended up working at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. I was trading derivatives, which was quite an interesting experience and I did really like the statistics behind it.

I started a first Master’s in finance and I ended up doing my PhD in spatial statistics. Robert Adler, who was the expert in Gaussian random fields told me he’d take me on after that for a postdoc but that that I’d be using pure maths to do computation and data analysis, which was his current focus. That was my initiation into topological data analysis.

After my PhD, I was very lucky to work at some of the best statistics departments in the world, like Duke University. Along the way, I got experience with biology and got to see how real biological data works.

I got to work with biologists and clinicians, and it was a really important experience to learn about how they generate their data, what kind of data that they get, what kind of questions are interested in? I got to formulate my own interpretations of their problems.

And I got hired at Imperial after I had my baby, and during COVID when everything was remote. I feel very fortunate to have had quite a successful start, even though I was working remotely. I was able to recruit five PhD students in my first year and sort of build my group that way.

Mimi Hii

Having graduated from Leeds with a PhD, I went to Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher and a junior research fellow at Wadham College. After brief spell back at Leeds, I started my independent academic career at King's College London in 1998, before moving to Imperial in 2003.

I cannot believe I'm near the start of my third decade as at Imperial!

You hear a lot of people say that Imperial is a highly interdisciplinary place, and I will definitely agree with that. Here, I began collaborating with colleagues in Chemical Engineering, which extended my personal interest from fundamental studies into applied industrial chemistry, where we have to scale up reactions from a tiny test tube to a multi-kilogram scale. 

Recently, we were successful in a bid for a EPSRC Prosperity Partnership grant: Innovative Continuous Manufacturing of Industrial Chemicals (IConIC), involving an industrial consortium co-led by BASF.

We're combining chemistry, engineering, and advanced data science to deliver sustainable solutions to the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and speciality chemicals.

One of the big turning points of my career came with the historical move of the Department of Chemistry from South Kensington to White City.

I took the opportunity to bid for strategic equipment grant from the EPSRC and establish the Centre for Rapid Analysis of Reaction (ROAR): a suite of automated and high through-put equipment dedicated to acquiring a large quantity of data.

While similar facilities may exist in very well-endowed industrial R&D labs, ROAR is different because we are the only facility that are openly accessible to researchers anywhere in the UK.

This was followed by a successful bid for a CDT programme in Next Generation Synthesis & Reaction Technology, to train students in digital skills. I am proud to see that despite COVID disruptions, our first cohort of students are starting to graduate and moving on to exciting careers. 

Anežka Klustova

I come from a very small town in the Czech Republic. I always wanted to be a scientist, but there was always a worry about the feasibility of it all in the back in my mind. I probably didn’t even understand at first what becoming a scientist entails and yet!  

I go back to my town and to my primary school to do outreach programmes now. It’s nice to show them that you can actually do science when you come from my town.

Moving to London was also massive for me. I’d only ever spoken English in my English lessons, so I hadn’t studied maths or physics or chemistry in English.

I went to my first maths lecture, I followed everything that was written on the board, but they were obviously explaining it in English and I didn’t understand a single thing. I had to go back home and just translate it word-by-word because I didn’t have the vocabulary.

Now, it’s the opposite. Because I’ve done my physics research in English, it would take a minute to be able to talk about it in Czech!

Anthea Monod

I recently came back to work from maternity leave, which is not only just about the challenges of being a woman, but also the challenges of carrying responsibilities.

There are other researchers who have to take care of elderly parents, for example. It’s something you have to roll with all the time. Just last week, both of my kids were home from nursery and I had to cancel things and move things around.

I think Imperial has supportive mechanisms in place. For example, right now I’m on an Elsie Widdowson Fellowship, which means that after I return from work from maternity leave, I don’t have any teaching or admin duties for one year after coming back from maternity leave so that I can get back into my research.

It’s unheard of in many other universities, but it still leads to contradictions, because not teaching and not doing any admin still does affect your overall profile as a university academic. 

I think that there's still a lot of room for improvement in terms of mentality, standards, and money invested into initiatives to help researchers with caring responsibilities.

Doryen Bubeck

I have a very different perspective now on life and on science. I've just come back to work after nine months battling breast cancer and breast cancer treatments. I had a lot of days like that, days that shook me. What kept me motivated is community, it's engagement.

It's feeling connected to your peers, the staff that are working for you, the researchers and PhD students that are working with you. It helps keep you focused on the real end goal about what's really important.

It's not chasing the paper, the grant, the promotion or the achievement. It's about creating a community that supports each other, where you can spark each other’s new ideas.

It also made me realise how important the basic science research we are doing in the lab is and how it will inform the next generation of cancer treatments.

I came from a supportive scientific environment. I had a great PhD supervisor. One thing that he did was that he recognised what motivated individuals, rather than project his own idea of success on them.

I try to do the same thing where I take the time to listen and figure out what my students or postdocs are trying get out of science. How can I help them achieve what they are looking for?

Anežka Klustova

I’m very goal oriented, so even when I had a bad five days, I didn’t think, ‘I’m not going to make it.’ I knew I would eventually.

I will say that academia is a very specific environment. My parents didn’t go to university so I didn’t even know how the university process worked. I didn’t know about PhDs or postdocs or fellowships, or how you become a lecturer. I’m kind of finding out about all these things as I go.

What helped me navigate these things was just talking to people. At first, I was scared to ask questions about it. Like, what if I annoy them? What if it’s not my place to ask about these things?

But you just have to overcome the fear of rejection, and it becomes so much easier. I was really scared or anxious to ask for help at first because I felt I needed to prove that I deserved to be here.

But I just grew more comfortable over time, and understood that asking questions is not a bad thing.