Helena Kelly

 So, my job is very varied. I think a lot of people, when they hear of somebody who works in a college or a university, they think that our job is mainly lecturing, so that we spend most of our days lecturing to students and perhaps correcting exam papers or writing exam papers, but in actual fact that is a very small part of the job that I normally do.

So my job consists of three main components. I do some teaching to pharmacy students, so students who are training to become professionally registered pharmacists, and I teach in the area of what’s called drug delivery, so how to make medicines and how to formulate medicines. So, for example, paracetamol is a drug, but that drug has to be turned into a form that patients can actually take. So, for example, a tablet or a solution for a child. So, I teach on how you make those formulations and how you design those medicines. So that’s one part of my job.

The second part of my job involves research. So, I spend a lot of time writing research grants to obtain funding in order to be able to examine new research ideas and look at research questions. The areas I work in include cancer and diabetes and heart disease. I look at helping other researchers develop new treatments that can be delivered in very novel ways, so that the method of treatment can be improved in those conditions.

Then the third part of my job involves a lot of travel. So, I do quite a lot of work with the college in China, and I’ve recently been involved in developing a new program in pharmacy with a Chinese university, so I spend some time travelling to China both in terms of meeting with the people in the university to discuss what that program is going to look like but also to do some teaching over there as well.