| What industry do you work in and how would you describe what you do (your elevator pitch!)? |
| I work in the biopharmaceutical industry as a project manager where we manufacture leading cancer drugs for patients all over the world. I contribute by managing projects which help us to continue to evolve and improve our impact. I am very passionate about Diversity & Inclusion, and I like to express this by working with diverse teams and championing initiatives targeting gender eqaulity.
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| What was your favourite subject in school and why? |
| My favourite subject in school was Chemistry! Closely followed by mathematics. I loved solving problems and the feeling when you understand new topics in science. To me, chemistry and math were black and white, as there was always one right answer! I had wonderful teachers who made the subjects easy to understand. |
| How did you get into your line of work? Can you talk us through a quick overview of your career path to date? |
| I studied a Masters in Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University in Belfast. During that time, I completed a 15 month internship at a pharmaceutical company, where I learned a huge amount about manufacturing medicines. After I graduated, I started working for MSD on their manufacturing leadership development program. This program lasted 3 years and gave me the opportunity to explore different nodes of the manufacturing division. During this time, I worked closely with the manufacturing process for human cancer treatment by supporting large scale production and running the entire process at small scale in the lab. I also completed a rotation in our Supply Chain Management organisation for Animal Health. I developed a love for leading projects and decided to become a full-time project manager after the program. I love being a project manager as there is so much variety in the projects that I manage.
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| When do you use creative thinking and problem solving in your line of work? |
| As every project is different, we get the opportunity to be creative with every new project. The business has a goal, and we think creatively about how to reach that goal: What work could help us improve our processes? Who can help us get there? What can we do to make this happen quickly? I love to bring experts together for brainstorming workshops where we decide our scope and identify any risks. We use problem solving when issues come up, and we apply methods like 8-step problem solving to identify a root cause and countermeasures to ensure that we never see the same problem again.
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| Any top tips for young people looking to get into your area of work? |
| Soak up as much experience as you can and follow your interests! Your career is long, so you want to make sure that you enjoy it! Get involved in as much as you can early in your career so that you can find out what you like (and don’t like!) then follow your interests. You will always be good at what you do so long as you enjoy it. |
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