What were your main reasons for choosing to undertake postgraduate research at the University of Liverpool?
The University of Liverpool is one of the best universities in the world, renowned by the scientific community and home of several Nobel Prize laureates. Also, Liverpool is a beautiful city with a great artistic and cultural history. And more importantly, I have found a good research group and research project to which I’ve identified myself very well.
Can you summarise your postgraduate research in a few sentences?
I’m investigating the how the different members of the BCL-2 family of proteins can be targeted for cancer therapy and what are the cellular consequences of that targeting. For that, I use different cancer cell lines and assess several aspects of the apoptotic pathway, looking for specific changes that some of the inhibitors might have caused. My main objective is to validate some of these inhibitors and to describe potential cellular changes caused by them.
How do you believe postgraduate research will help your career prospects?
Enabling me to learn new techniques, being in contact with state-of-the-art research, planning my own experiments and having a deeper understanding of how science works and is conducted by the scientific community.
What advice would you give to anyone considering undertaking a PhD?
Get in touch with the lead of the research group you are interested in. Talk with the students of that group to make sure you know how research is conducted by them. Be clear about your objectives and workframe, it’s always better to have all the doubts clarified before jumping into a few years of scientific work. And most importantly, make sure you are happy with your project and you understand all the work and the steps that will need to be taken for its completion.