Julie Wain
PhD Student
After completing my degree in physiology at Newcastle, I spent a year working as a medical sales representative in Bristol for a pharmaceutical company. Although I enjoyed living in a different city after three years in Newcastle, I missed learning about diseases and wanted to be able to have some input into where my work was heading. I had enjoyed my third year undergraduate project working with Dr Simi Ali in Surgery and had contemplated studying further at the time, so returning to Newcastle University to study for a PhD in the same group felt like the next logical step.
Surgery has many links with other areas and the result is a friendly and welcoming place. Surgery has just held its first charity fundraising night, complete with sponsored headshaves!
Our group works on aspects of immunobiology and transplant rejection. I'm now halfway through my PhD and am looking at how inflammatory mediators called chemokines can induce a response from blood-borne leukocytes during organ rejection. I recently presented my work in a talk at the British Society for Immunology's annual conference and am hoping to attend an international conference in Sweden later in the year. Conference are great for meeting other people and getting ideas about your own work. After my PhD, I would like to remain in a research environment and further develop my molecular biology skills, amongst other research interests.
