Meet Professor James Flanagan
What course do you teach on and what is your role?
I am the course director for the MRes Cancer Biology. The majority of my teaching focuses on this course.
How has your career led you to teaching?
I started my research group in 2009 at Imperial College London as a Breast Cancer Now Scientific Fellow, and have progressed through Senior Lecturer, Reader and now Professor. In all that time my research has focussed on breast and ovarian cancer, looking at epigenetics of cancer risk and early detection. More recently, we have been working on digital health research. So, it was my Research that brought me to Imperial College, but it is the opportunities for teaching that keeps me here. Together with Dr Ed Curry, I designed the Cancer Informatics stream to provide an opportunity to teach students who already know how to do cancer biology wet lab research to also be able to do bioinformatics. Its the students that can do both that will have the best sets of skills for future biomedical research. We launched that stream in 2014 and it has been growing ever since. In 2021 I was appointed as the Director of the whole MRes Cancer Biology course.
What aspect of the course do you enjoy teaching the most?
There are so many aspects of this course that I love teaching. I really enjoy the "flipped classroom" approach that we adopted a few years ago where we introduce a topic but get the students to develop their ideas on those topics and present to the class and discuss them. Discussing a topic is so much more enjoyable as a teacher, than lecturing on one. I also really enjoy teaching students how to code in R, especially the students who are scared of bioinformatics (it's not that scary once you get to know it!). The last thing I really enjoy is when we place students in their projects, whether that is at Imperial College or in our partner institutes like the Francis Crick or the Institute of Cancer Research. That is where the real learning begins. It's great to see students you have supervised grow into living, breathing, thinking, academic scientists by the time they finish this course.
What do you hope your students will go on to achieve on completion of this course?
The majority of our students go on to a PhD after this course. Much of the training and assessments are geared towards developing students into becoming PhD graduates and future academic scientists. Of course, many other career paths are out there, whether that is into Big Pharma, Biotech, Medicine or working as a researcher in an academic setting. All options are open.
What is your favourite part about teaching at Imperial College London?
Number one is the high quality of students that apply to come to Imperial College London. The MRes Cancer Biology is a competitive course to get into, so those that do are the Best of the Best, which is largely why its so enjoyable to teach them. Next is the innovation, changes and constant evolution of the course. It just gets better and better each year. This year we introduced a new stream called Cancer Innovation led by Dr Ali Salehi-Reyhani, which has been very exciting to see get off the ground with our first batch of Innovators. Lastly, you have probably heard that saying "The best way to learn something, is to teach it." So, like the students, I'm still learning too.