Professor Mary Collins started her new role as Director of the Blizard Institute on 1 October 2022. Now that she has been in post for a few months, we caught up with her to hear about her experience so far and hear her upcoming plans for the future of the Institute. Mary also shares with us some of her current research, and talks about life outside of work.
I've really enjoyed it! I've met a lot of very clever people at all levels at the Blizard - students, professional staff, researchers. I think the place is a bit of a hidden gem and we need to publicise it a bit better, because sometimes people don't really know how good it is here and they don't know how strong our links are with biomedical research and the Hospital. So, I've been very impressed and a bit surprised!
Well, another piece of surprisingly good news is that Queen Mary has got quite a few posts in play – academic posts that we can look to fill – and we've started doing that. I think the goal for my first year is to make sure we get the best possible people in. That will involve looking around the world for who would fit here, both in terms of their research quality strategy, and how they fit in with other research at the Blizard and the clinical practice at the Hospital.
I'm also hoping to bring in an external advisory board to talk about the research and which direction we should go in the following years. That’s plenty to be getting on with.
For my own research, I have a collaboration with a colleague at Birkbeck, and we're trying to understand how a key enzyme involved in inflammation and cancer can be regulated by a virus. We've published a string of papers on this, and we still don't really understand it even though we first identified the interaction a long time ago. So, I want to talk to her a little more and try to get some funding to carry on with that. Most of what I do is leadership these days.
I like working so that's one thing! In the week I like to be at work, and I like to meet people. I'm quite social, so I also like talking about science, talking about the Blizard, and being at work in general. On the weekends I ride horses, so I was lucky to find some new rides when I got back from Okinawa. And I like my garden – I've had some trees trimmed and I've now got a new planting proposition for the garden, so that's what I've been doing on the weekend.
Well, I recently gave an inaugural lecture at the Blizard Institute, so people have seen my nearest and dearest who are my two daughters. They are great and are now looking after me finally! I've got to be so old that they're helping me with tech, so it's terrific. I think I bared my soul at that inaugural lecture, so I think probably anybody who went to that will know me pretty well.
I think I'm fairly straightforward – I'm either at the Blizard working or in the garden or at the stables. I like to sleep a lot too! I try to sleep 12 hours a night which I've heard is bad for you health wise, but in the winter I'm going to bed at eight o'clock and getting up at seven thirty, so sleep is a big part of my life!
I also just want to thank everyone at the Blizard for making me so welcome, and for bringing the Blizard to this great position it's in already. I hope together we can put a few little finishing touches to it – that's my plan.