Dr Samantha Barichievy

For the longest time I've been interested in the molecular, nuts-and-bolts, mechanisms of disease and spent over a decade digging into Tuberculosis and HIV to understand some of that. It's complicated. And we're only really scratching the surface in many instances. But each time we dig, we learn more.

Joining the pharmaceutical industry provided opportunities to build different molecular tools for understanding disease. We can use them to uncover key targets that we can manipulate to shift the disease balance back in our favour. It's fantastic work - it's extremely challenging technically and intellectually, it's a highly collaborative effort driven by teams of incredible people, and our curiosity is rewarded by improving someone's health.

I lead an amazing team of folks, and together we get into the nuts-and-bolts of disease to try and make new medicines. We spend our time building cellular models of disease to drive the drug discovery pipeline, and are continually looking for ways to advance in this particularly challenging arena.