Sean Leonard, Senior Medical Scientist

Career snapshot

Originally from Belmullet, Co Mayo, where he attended St Brendan’s College. Sean now works in the haemotology department at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin, Dublin.

Degrees

• BSc in Biochemistry and Microbiology from University College Galway (1996)
• Master’s degree in Biomedical Science (1997)

After his master’s degree, Sean worked at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in England as a trainee medical scientist. He was state registered in Britain two years later, following an oral examination. The hospital was a large general hospital, where a lot of the laboratory samples were from pre-operative and GP patients. “It was a good place to learn the basic of working in a haematology laboratory,” he says.

After working there for three years he moved back to Ireland and started work in Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children. “It is more specialised than the lab in Reading,” Sean says, “But I enjoyed the challenge of learning how to do new tests and learning about the more specialised tests.”

He started in Crumlin at a basic grade and after a year and a half became a senior medical scientist. He is now in charge of the coagulation section of the laboratory, which he says is growing quite rapidly.

Whats so great about your job?

“The feeling that you are making the difference to a patient’s health. We are part of a network of people in a hospital and we are all working to accomplish the same thing.”

What do you hate about the job?

“Having to work weekends. The lab has to remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

How do you spend a typical day?

“In the morning I come in to the lab and set the analysers up for the day. After that, we run any samples that come down to the lab. We also run any special tests that are run once a week. We have a large number of special tests which are split up and are spread out over the week. There is never a time where there is not something that needs to be done.”

Does your work require a lot of equipment?

“A large majority of the tests done are done on machines, so we have to ensure that they are maintained correctly. Sometimes I feel more like an engineer than a medical scientist when these machines break down.”

Are you a science nerd?

“Yes and no. I am really big into surfing and windsurfing, where physics plays a big part, so indirectly I am still thinking of science even outside of work. My favourite channel on television is the Discovery Channel, so the answer is probably yes.”

Did you get a buzz from science at school?

“I discovered science before I got to school and I couldn’t wait to start the subject.”

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He studied surgery in Leyden, Paris and London. The influence of Parisian style and culture during his University days in Paris was apparent on his return to Limerick to practise. A contemporary described him as “The tall, thin Doctor in his quaint French dress, with his gold-headed cane, beautiful Parisian wig and cocked hat.”

O’Halloran did extensive research into the eye and ophthalmology, but in particular cataracts. He published a ‘Treatise on Cataracts’ which was presented to the Royal Society in 1752.

His talent also extended to General Surgery. In 1765 he published his book ‘New Method of Amputation’. The Appendix to this book, ‘Proposals for the Advancement of Surgery in Ireland’ led to the establishment of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Apart from his love of surgery, O’Halloran had a deep interest in Irish History, Geography and Politics and published many books on the subjects.

He was also one of the chief founders of the County Limerick Infirmary.

Although this seems like a slow start to his scientific career, Kane achieved many things while studying for his degree:

He qualified to practice medicine and won a gold medal in doing so; successfully analysed the mineral arsenide of manganese and had it called after him (Kaneite); became a Professor of Chemistry; was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy; published a textbook on pharmacy; and founded a scientific journal that is still in print today.

Despite his in-depth study of medicine and pharmacy, Kane’s main scientific interest was always chemistry. He made many contributions to the field, including isolating acetone from wood spirit in 1836.

He was appointed lecturer in natural philosophy and later professor of chemistry at the Royal Dublin Society where he worked for 13 years. During this time he published a three-volume textbook on chemistry, which was to become a bestseller.

Outside of science, Sir Robert (he was knighted in 1846) advised the government about education, at a national and university level. He was also made Director of the Museum of Irish Industry and the first President of the Queens College Cork.

Overall, Robert Kane had a huge influence and impact on science and education in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

John Joseph Gallagher - studying for a PhD in neuroscience

What were your main ‘career decision’ milestones so far?

I did a degree course in Electronic Engineering and by the end of it I had very little interest in working in that area. I then did a Masters in Medical Physics – this was a great move.

It opened up a whole host of new areas that I could work in and it got me interested in biology.

I then spent some time working in the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC) and the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) as a Clinical Engineer.

I got to carry out some research in the CRC and assessed clinical trial applications in the IMB, and this work convinced me that I wanted to do a PhD.

Who are the people who most influenced your career direction?

I talked to a lot of people when considering going back to college. The people who offered the best advice were friends who had done PhDs or were halfway through one.

A brother of a friend of mine was one of the few people I knew that was an engineer working in biology – he was able to provide some really helpful advice as well.

Does your job allow you to have a lifestyle you are happy with?

I organise my days as I want, starting and finishing at times that suit me. A great advantage of doing a PhD is being able to take long stretches of time off to go travelling.

As a PhD student you have to accept that you’re going to spend some time not earning as much as the people who you went to college with. However, the hope is that your time spent researching will prove more beneficial as you move on and that what you’ve done will open up more doors for you.

What are the main tasks and responsibilities?

Carrying out experiments is the part of the job that I spend the most of my time on. Equally important is keeping up to date with the research area and writing up results.

Often you spend time helping someone out with a technique or learning something from another person.

What’s cool?

The best part of the job is learning about something that completely changes how things in a certain area are understood.

People all over the world are making advances in different areas and to be able to hear, understand and contribute to these is extremely rewarding.

What subjects did you take in school and how have these influenced your career path?

I didn’t do any life science subjects in school or college. I only realised my interest in the area after I did my degree and although this placed me at a disadvantage initially, it doesn’t matter so much as every research field is so complex that very few people know it all.

I don’t regret studying engineering subjects at an undergraduate level. As I now get to combine these approaches in a completely different field such as neuroscience. This could have never happened the other way around!

What is your education to date?

• Leaving Cert – Physics, Economics, Technical Drawing (1999)
• Electronic Engineering degree in NUI, Galway (1999-2003)
• Masters in Medical Physics in NUI, Galway (2003-2004)
• Four-year integrated PhD in Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin (2005-present)

What aspects of your education have proven most important for your job?

I am in a four-year PhD programme in neuroscience. In the first year I carried out three lab rotations. I got to spend some time working in a genetics lab, a psychology lab and a magnetic resonance imaging lab.

This exposure to so many different areas and techniques was fantastic. It made me realise that you need to really explore and learn about any field of research before you start work in it.

Have you undertaken, or do you plan to undertake any further training as part of your job?

I’m always very interested in learning new things, specifically new techniques and approaches. I would love to spend some time learning about stem cells.

I think when you work in research you’re always eager to learn new things.

What personal qualities do you have that helps you in your career?

I’m fairly organised and that helps, but I think being a curious person is the quality that really makes a difference in a PhD.

You also have to be extremely determined as experiments often don’t work out.

What is your dream job?

I’d love to be a science journalist, to get a chance to see and hear about what all the best and brightest in the world are up to would be great.

What advice would you give to someone considering this job?

Anyone who has done a PhD will tell you that you have to be really hard working and extremely persistent. You also need to be interested in the area you’re working in.

Most of the people I know who have done PhDs are also highly motivated and don’t really need to be looked after on a day-to-day basis.

A major aspect of every PhD student’s life is their supervisor. Supervisors differ greatly in their approach. If you’re considering doing a PhD try to talk to people who have worked under that supervisor to see if you think the style of supervision suits you.

What are the three most important personal characteristics required for the job?

Organised, curious and persistent.

What kinds of work experience would provide a good background for this position?

It’s always good to do a undergraduate project in the field you want to work in. Even better would be to do the project in a lab you might like to work in.

Brian O'Connor - Analytical Chemist

What have been your main “career decision” milestones so far?

When I was 15, I moved to the United States to live with my father after I completed my Junior Certificate. I always planned on being a doctor of medicine from an early age, and this didn’t change when I got to America.

In the States though, you have to complete an undergraduate degree first. So I chose chemistry, while completing a minor study in biology and maths.

I fell in love with chemistry and switched plans, deciding to go to graduate school in chemistry. I completed my Masters of Science later at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Who most influenced your career direction?

Perhaps the biggest influences in choosing chemistry were my undergraduate professors, Dr Naylor and Bunde.

They both had such a passion for chemistry, which I couldn’t understand at first because I felt that all people hated chemistry or that you couldn’t learn to love such a subject.

Their passion for it rubbed off on me and I too learned to love the subject.

Chemistry is a great subject because everything around you is chemistry. The more you can understand it the more you enjoy it.

Does your job allow you to have a lifestyle you are happy with?

Yes. Wyeth is a great company to work for and they ensure that employees have a good work/life balance.

I find that I get good time off and I don’t see work interfering with my personal life too much. I also get to travel quite freely and love to hit other spots around Europe.

I’ve been very fortunate at Wyeth to have progressed through several levels since being here, and I am now manager of the raw materials lab after joining as an analyst.

How did you go about getting your current job?

While still living in America I heard that Wyeth were opening a plant in Clondalkin, where I grew up. I was excited about the prospect of actually working in a biotech plant in Clondalkin.

I applied online, then when I moved back to Ireland I went to an assessment centre which also included an interview, some role-playing and aptitude tests. I was called soon after and was told that I’d got the job.

Describe a typical day

My typical day involves taking part in a lot of different meetings with people from around the site. As manager of my area it is important that I am always planning ahead for what new activities may be coming into the group.

Some of the meetings are for this planning while others deal with day-to-day activities in the lab. I talk to my supervisors daily to discuss any issues in the lab.

What are the main tasks and responsibilities?

Ensuring that we release raw materials in time to keep up with the demands of the production schedule. We essentially have four different manufacturing areas at Grange Castle and each one demands different use of different raw materials.

The raw materials are the ingredients of the drugs and if we do not release them then manufacturing will not proceed,

What are the main challenges?

As in any chemistry lab we have to deal with atypical or out-of-specification results. When these happen, at first you are unsure whether the batch of material in question is of the quality standard expected.

We conduct investigations which at times can be very laborious. Besides this, other main challenges would be to keep the group content with the work they are doing.

It is important that we are all constantly challenging each other to help us learn more about science and develop into more all-rounded scientists.

What’s cool?

The coolest thing about the job is seeing the results when patients take our drugs. The drugs produced at Grange Castle dramatically improve patients’ lives.

What particular skills do you bring to your workplace?

As an analytical chemist, the best skills I bring to the job are around the use of analytical instrumentation and the interpretation of data from it. Analytical chemistry is important to all of us as it ensures through testing that products from food to medicines are safe for us to consume.

What subjects did you take in school and how have these influenced your career path?

Because I didn’t do my Leaving Certificate in Ireland, I didn’t have to make as big choices earlier on in my life. It was when I went to college that I chose the subjects that I wanted to do.

I chose to major in chemistry and to minor in biology as a pre medical school student. In America you have to complete a degree first before you are accepted into medical school.

By my third year of college I fell in love with chemistry and no longer wished to go to med school. It’s funny how it all worked out but I have no regrets – I really enjoy being a chemist.

What is your education to date?

I went to three secondary schools:

Moyle Park College in Clondalkin, where I completed my Junior Cert
Plantation High School, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1 Year)
Hartselle High School, Hartselle, Alabama (2 Years) – High School Diploma
In Tennessee in Maryville College I did a degree in chemistry and then moved to California to the University of California Riverside where I completed my masters in analytical chemistry.

What aspects of your education have proven most important for your job?

Graduate school specifically was where I really learned to understand chemistry. Looking back now, the majority of undergraduate work is an introduction to chemistry.

The subject is so vast that you can only truly learn to understand aspects of it. I chose to be an analytical chemist, and did my initial research on instrumentation, which involved building instruments such as mass spectrometers in grad school.

My courses in analytical chemistry, notably around separation techniques, are still applicable to me today in my function and are most important to me in my job.

What have been the most rewarding events in your career so far?

When I was at Amgen I worked in pure research. We were trying to find cures for different types of cancer, arthritis and other uncured illnesses. Knowing you were playing a role in this was very rewarding.

What personal qualities do you have that helps you in your career?

As a manager, you have to be a very organised person who knows how to prioritise well. Of utmost importance is that you have good people skills. Nobody wants a boss that is yelling at them.

To get the most out of people you need to have a positive approach and let people know when they are doing well just as when they need to improve. I have a positive outlook on life and I think this all helps.

What is your dream job?

I think if I had all the money in the world I’d probably just stay in school full time. I love to learn. I do learn at my job currently which is very important to me.

I’d love to have a job where I learned about different things all the time. There are not too many like that out there. As scientists we tend to become experts in the area that we studied in.

What advice would you give to someone considering this job?

Science is a fascinating subject and you truly have to immerse yourself in it. When you do, the rewards are fantastic. It is of course a tough subject but once completed you learn how to solve many problems yourself.

What are the three most important personal characteristics required for the job?

• Sound chemistry knowledge
• Good leadership skills
• Good people skills

What kinds of work experience would provide a good background for this position?

Any work experience that you can gain in a lab, whether it is for a summer or over a transition year. You have to enjoy your time in the lab, as you will be there for the first few years or throughout your career even.

Not all scientists work in labs. I think that’s a big misunderstanding. But almost all scientists do spend time in there initially, so it is important to spend as much time in there through work experience to see whether this is the type of job that suits you.

Prof Jim Malone, Medical Physicist

What were the main ‘career decision’ milestones in your life so far?

The role of chance and openness to circumstances, were as important in my career as the conscious and deliberate choices. Science was an important choice in both school and college.

But after college the fact that there was a postage strike in Ireland meant that I could not make the final arrangements for a job I had accepted in Canada.

It was in the late 1960s and a transatlantic phone call would have been too expensive. So I took a temporary job in medical physics in Scotland and this determined my future career for 40 years.

This mixture of deliberate, worked-at choice and good luck /chance has happened over and over again. Sometimes it has been a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but just as often it seems random.

The management roles I took on from the age of about 40 onwards weren’t planned. Science provided a good background and circumstances gave me the push to take them on. They were generally difficult but rewarding.

It is a good idea to plan, but is also a good idea to be open to what the world, nature or destiny may graciously lay at your feet. This can seem like a poisoned chalice, but look at it and inspect it anyway; it is amazing what can happen. Clouds can have silver linings.

Who are the people who most influenced your career direction?

My parents were open to the idea of science as a career, which would have been relatively new at the time. Thereafter I made my own way.

I wanted a career that would contribute in a positive way to individuals and society and thus social motivation was important.

I don’t quite know where this came from but it was in the air in the 1960s when I was in college. I think people of my parent’s generation felt the need to give back to society.

In addition, physics at that time had a kind of glamour that is today enjoyed by biomolecular sciences and genetic engineering. If one was interested at all, it was hard not to be pulled in by the glamour that attached to physics at the time.

The potential risks and evil that can also be delivered from the same source had not been well articulated. It was only later that the scale and subtlety of this became obvious. That was a lesson in itself that further shaped my career.

I now regularly spend time working for the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which, incidentally, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

What’s cool?

Giving a paper on an exciting topic to which my own work has contributed.

Sorting out a serious scientific, engineering or safety problem for a colleague in the hospital. The hospital can be somewhere in the third world and the work may be done for the UN.

Finishing a report or manual for the UN that will be used in hospitals throughout the world.

What subjects did you take in school and how have these influenced your career path?

For the Leaving (1961), I took maths, English, Irish, Latin, geography, physics and chemistry.
These were important for my subsequent career, although they did not quite match what I did initially, which was to join the Franciscan Order for a few years.

However, possibly surprisingly, the Franciscans were open to my doing science at college. Thus I did physics and maths, but in the company of people doing languages, literature, philosophy and history etc. From this grew a life long interest in the humanities, particularly in philosophy and literature.

I left the Franciscans but they gave me an interest in applying science in a way that did not damage the world. I also got the beginnings of a free floating and un-churched type of spirituality.

What have been the most rewarding events in your career so far?

Several things, ranging from the very first job I got in medical physics after college. This was a rewarding achievement.

Later on, setting up and establishing a medical physics and bioengineering department at St James’s Hospital that functions well for the health service and for Trinity College. Running an MSc course for young medical physicists was a satisfying challenge. I was proud to be appointed a professor in Trinity.

Later I was appointed dean of the faculty of health sciences and director of graduate studies there. It was rewarding that people felt a scientist could undertake these roles, as science is often assumed to be either nerdy or narrow.

I particularly enjoyed the latter and learned much from the people setting up new postgraduate courses in all kinds of subjects including psychotherapy, molecular biology and health service management.

What personal qualities do you have that helps you in your career?

Both imagination and courage are important. Imagination to be able to see and appreciate what is in front of you and the courage to act accordingly. This is not always easy to do, even in science.

Enjoying people is important in any task with a high level of management, which some of my later jobs had. It is also an asset in science.

What is your dream job?

I’ve been lucky enough to have had it already. I feel I had a special job and was lucky to have employers I was able to persuade to allow me shape it so it was possible to work well in it.

What advice would you give to someone considering this job?

Curiosity, imagination, numeracy, liking aspects of science, wanting to put it to socially responsible use.

What are the three most important personal characteristics required for the job?

Liking people, being able to work as part of a team, a commitment to service of other people. Creativity can be important.

In radiotherapy physics, which is a distinctive subset of medical physics, a capacity for careful attention to detail is essential.

What kinds of work experience would provide a good background for this position?

Some education and training in, and aptitude for science. Work experience in any aspect of hospital life; even better if you can get work experience in areas such as a medical physics unit, radiology department, anaesthetic or intensive care department.