Helen Sawney

Employer: AstraZeneca
Qualifications: BSc biochemistry, University of Bristol

People think scientists are the stereotypical ‘geeks’ with no social skills and in films the scientist is usually the weird one, but that’s really not the case and gives a misleading view of a career in science. For one thing, bioscience is fairly female-dominated, which people don’t expect. All the people I work with are nice and ‘normal’ – we all get on well and it’s a far more sociable job than people realise. We’re certainly not all shut away in our separate labs experimenting away.

The graduate job

My responsibilities involve running the screening assay – a process of testing whether compounds are active and checking they are hitting the targets they are designed to reach. This is preliminary research necessary to developing the drugs so it’s pretty exciting to be part of creating such up-to-date treatments. At the moment I am working with osteoarthritis compounds.

I feel like I’m constantly learning, which is not something you get in all careers. My mornings usually consist of setting up the experiments for the day and analysing data from the day before. At the end of each week I have to send the results of my research and testing to the chemists – we are all part of a team and we each have a different role to play in the process of developing compounds into drugs.