Collaborative PhD programme 2

Hi, my name is Kate and I'm in my third year on the collaborative PhD scheme between GSK and the University of Strathclyde. I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Durham, which was an integrated Master's course with a year in industry. And I was really fortunate to spend this year synthesising pharmaceutical compounds here at GSK. I enjoyed it so much that I stayed on and was fortunate to get a place on the PhD scheme. The scheme is a collaborative scheme between academia and industry, where we're predominantly based in industry at GSK and Stevenage, with support from Strathclyde up in Glasgow.

I work in the field of chemical biology and the interface between chemistry and biology, working to accelerate drug discovery. Specifically, I'm developing reactive functionalities, which are valuable tools to identify targets for compounds and to generally investigate protein targets that have disease relevance.

Having spent a year at GSK on placement, I was very keen to continue my PhD here. So I saw firsthand the great benefits of being based in industry that equips you with professional experience alongside the development as a researcher through the PhD qualification, having access to such a variety of resources and learning from people who are experts in their field is absolutely invaluable. It means that we're able to achieve a large amount of work very quickly and also conduct work that is highly impactful and applied directly to GSK projects. Beyond GSK it's brilliant to be able to tap into expertise and academia through supervision from Strathclyde, and more generally, with the many academic collaborations that we've grown within the chemical biology group at GSK.

The pandemic meant that we're not able to access the lab for a few months, which has a lab beef PhD student was daunting. However, I was grateful to have the time to learn new skills that I otherwise would not have had the chance to prioritise. I very much enjoyed devoting the time to learn to code in our and now I always use this to communicate my research results effectively, both internally at GSK and presenting at many external conferences. The pandemic also allowed me to spend time developing my writing skills and conduct many projects have introduced new exciting angles to my PhD research.

In five years time, I hope to be working in the healthcare industry as I find the field a great match to my strengths and thoroughly enjoy knowing that my work is contributed to people's well being