Careers in research

KIRSTEEN CAMPBELL: My name is Dr. Kirsteen Campbell and I work at the Beatson Cancer Research Institute in Glasgow as a post-doctoral researcher. So I work in the cancer research field and this is an area of quite large funding, actually, in life sciences research because it’s a big problem and we’re all very worried about this and we want to improve the outcome of a cancer diagnosis. And I’d say very much emerging fields within cancer research are areas of genome editing to look how we can implement that in cancer therapy. Immunology, as well, as a cancer therapy is a big area just now. And then also in recent years, metabolism has come back as a big favourite area in cancer research.

Working as a researcher really involves formulating ideas about how you think things work, thinking up experimental ways to test that, to test your hypothesis, and then performing experiments, interpreting the results, and if all goes well, you write up your results and you want to disseminate that to the world. So it’s really common for researchers to work in many different labs all around the world. And you can do this because you can have team funding to go and work for, say, three years in America or something like that. So it keeps you dynamic.