A typical day

I’m not sure I have a typical day because what I do is very varied. I run a research group at a University now and different anatomists in the team have different roles to play. As a member of the faculty my days involve both teaching and research responsibilities.

On the research side, my day usually involves some discussions with lab members and others on topical research issues, the design of some new experiments and analysis of the latest data from the lab. If I am lucky I still find some time to be at the bench myself carrying out experiments and hopefully producing new data. Scientific writing also features strongly within my day-to-day tasks, whether crafting a grant application or a new research manuscript for publication. When appropriate I attend national and international conferences and scientific meetings both to present work from the laboratory and also to develop new or existing collaborations.

I have chosen to have a major teaching role as part of my position, so I may be giving a lecture or holding a tutorial session or contributing to a practical class or symposium. This contact time with the students can be very rewarding and I find it helps to develop both teaching and research skills. The teaching possibilities are wide ranging, including undergraduate students studying medicine, dentistry, paramedical and science degrees and postgraduate students taking Masters courses or Doctoral research degrees.

My role also involves some committee work and other administrative elements associated with both research and teaching.

Rewards

It is really rewarding to be doing novel research that leads to a better understanding of the development and structure of our bodies and contributing to, for example, the development of new therapies for repair and regeneration of damaged or diseased tissues. Designing and executing your own experiments is very exciting and it is great fun examining the results (especially when they are not quite what you expect).

Presenting data from your experiments at conferences or as high impact publications is particularly rewarding. Conducting internationally recognised research gives you the opportunity to travel and to interact with many different scientists, either by attending scientific meetings and conferences or by working collaboratively with colleagues in different laboratories. When you set up a research laboratory and teach at a university you also have the enormous privilege of nurturing the research aspirations of students and young science scholars.

Having the academic freedom to follow your own research interests and thoughts is probably the most important reason that many of us pursue scientific research and carry on doing so year upon year - it’s intoxicating!