ECMC JING Alumni share their career journeys
05 Aug 2024
As part of the year-long offering for the 2024 JING Cohort, the ECMC Programme Office organised a career pathway webinar in July. The webinar was chaired by Uma Mukherjee, UCL ECMC and we heard from Emma Kerr, Belfast ECMC and Adam Sharp, ICR ECMC.
Both Emma and Adam summarised their career journeys, explaining why they had made certain decisions and what they had learnt. There was then the opportunity for attendees to submit questions for them both.
Emma is a CRUK Career Fellow sponsored by Werth Trust and Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, and Adam is an Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology at the Institute of Cancer Research. When sharing their career pathways, both Emma and Adam highlighted how flexibility and persistence were in their journeys so far.
Emma explained how she started her career doing a Biomedical Sciences degree at Queen’s University. In her final year she spent time in a cancer research lab and enjoyed it so much she then decided to pursue a PhD in Cancer Biology. Her future career decisions were partly informed by knowing that she wanted to spend some time away from Belfast to expand her experience before returning to Queen’s. She therefore spent six years in Cambridge as a post-doc before returning to Queen’s via a CRUK Career Development Fellowship. Emma also detailed challenges she faced as 18 months after returning to Belfast and setting up her own lab the pandemic hit.
Adam shared how he started off his career in science doing a BSc and PhD at Southampton. Due to frustration that as a scientist trying to translate what he was doing he was continually reliant on clinicians and collaborations, he decided to do graduate medicine and moved to ICR/Royal Marsden Hospital. After doing the standard medical training he stepped out of programme for three years to do a post-doc as he had been away from basic science for 7-8 years. In 2020 he became team leader and consultant. Adam flagged that his career journey is not typical but demonstrates that there is flexibility in the system, but that flexibility comes from having supportive mentors and training programme leads.
Some of the learnings both Emma and Adam shared were:
- Consider your location: can you deliver your science and do you have support?
- Network and collaborate: most people will want to support or help you if you just reach out to them
- Mentors: think about what aspects of your career you need mentorship/support in e.g. particular area of science/managing your career once you have children. Seek out independent mentors but don’t have mentors for the sake of it.
- There is no single right pathway so be flexible and seek out opportunities
- Everyone has failures (unsuccessful funding applications) so it is important for those in leadership positions to share this.
You can view the webinar here.