Profile

I love science. I love that it is the foundation of absolutely everything. I love what you can do with it. My parents are a Chemical Engineer and a Chemist, both with a love of technology and they passed on that passion. Now my own three teenage sons are showing it is in their genes too.

My oldest son (19) is studying Mechanical Engineering at University, the next one down (18) has a passion for Natural Sciences (Physics, Chemistry and Maths) and my youngest son (13) is heading towards Game Design. (All three of them are on-line as I type this playing “Space Engineers” together.) Exchanges with my sons and their friends give me a window into so many fascinating areas. I’d like to be able to do my bit to spark that interest in others too.

Outside work, I volunteer as an “expert patient” (along with other patients from all walks of life). We work with clinical research groups in various hospitals to help them understand what it is like to be a patient with a particular disease & what is important to us in our day to day lives. We all learn a lot from the discussions and each other.

My favourite subject at school was CDT (Craft, Design & Technology). In those days it was a “boys only” subject so I had to fight a bit to be able to choose it as an “O” Level and I was the only girl in the class. I really liked languages and science too. Computers were still a new thing and I was one of the first people to do a Computer Science “A” level. We didn’t have Windows then, only text-based programs.

When I left school, I studied Chemistry with Computer Science at university full-time, then later I studied Polymer Science & Technology with Medical Applications part-time while working.

Over my career, I’ve lived and worked in many countries such as England, Germany, Holland, Italy, Belgium, France, Canada, America, Switzerland and Japan. I speak English & German and have lived in Switzerland for 16 years. My work mates in my team are spread all over the world.

When I graduated, I first worked for Smith & Nephew in “Process Development”, taking ideas from the laboratory-based Research Scientists and working out how to turn their ideas into reality at production scale. I developed plastic materials for all sorts of uses from sticking plasters to new knee joints.

A two tonne reactor (production size) is a lot bigger than a jam jar (laboratory size), but the end product (a big batch of plastic resin) needs to come out with the same properties, like making a gigantic cake rather than a tray of muffins and it still needing to be tasty and cooked through.

After Smith & Nephew, I joined Deloitte, and later PricewaterhouseCoopers as a Management Consultant. My job was to help companies organise their work in a simpler way, often helping to design computer systems to make their work easier.

Now I work at Roche Pharmaceuticals in “Patient Safety & Risk Management”. I help my colleagues get the right tests & treatments to their local doctors and nurses as quickly and as safely as possible in over a hundred countries.

You can find out lots more about where I work here https://app.aumivi.ch/en/rochebasel/rochebasel

I wake up, get my youngest son out to school at 7am and then have a coffee while I check my email.

After that I have lots of video calls with different groups of people to catch up on what they are doing and if they have any local problems they need some help with. We put our different ideas together and work out what to do. Sometimes we work on it as a team and sometimes we give the work to another team because they have more experience in that subject.

My meetings are mostly with people in the Asia Pacific region in the morning – then with people in Europe across the middle of the day – and with the Americas in the late afternoon. We all use English to talk to each other.

Each day brings me together with different people from all sorts of backgrounds such as IT, production, quality assurance, product strategy, clinical trials, data management or medical information. It is really interesting.

Around 6pm my calls are done for the day and my sons and I all have dinner together at 7pm.