Medicinal Chemist 2

My name is Adrian, I'm a senior scientist within AstraZeneca.

Day to day, I’d say, my job is to develop and experiment to identify compounds within our compound bank, that can be taken on for future development against a certain project against a target within the body.

I would say 70% of the time I wear a white coat I'm in the lab, 30% of the time I'm in the office handling a lot of data that's coming from the experiments.

The job I'm doing now is very different really to job I started and I can see avenues now where I'm going that I've never imagined I would have gone whist I was at university.

As a country as a whole, I feel we require scientists to actually help build the country, and give us innovation, and it's also helping people on a day to day basis I'm aware of things I started working on when I started with the company, that are now going into the clinic, they're actually helping people and that gives you quite a quite a large buzz.

To bring new medicines forward that we do day to day, we have to be creative, we have to be innovative and that's thinking to the next step. So it’s a different creativity from painting a picture, but it's using my mind and in a different manner.

I love what I do it because no no-one day is the same. It's very varied. It's very challenging and within those challenges, comes a variation.

I think if you're at school, the best thing to do is to try and speak to somebody that's in a scientific role whether you've got a friend's parent who's a scientist who's working in a scientific industry is to talk to them, or whether in academia.

I think if your university, I found the best place was to go to our careers advice centre, because they were actually quite knowledgeable, and they then linked me to people who they had got jobs and roles within scientific industry.