Ramblings of a Drug Discovery PhD student who should really be in the lab or writing her thesis.
One of the most useful ways I prepared for my viva was by asking people who worked on similar PhD projects about their vivas and what they were asked. Below is a detailed but non-exhaustive list of questions and concepts I vaguely remember talking about during my viva. I hope it is useful as a …
Continue reading "What was I asked during my medicinal chemistry viva?"
I’ve been dabbling in various creative projects during UK lockdown to pass the time. This little project was inspired by embroidery Science A-Zs created by Lauren/@stitching_hew and Breann Abernathy/@biochemist.b on Instagram. Fiona holding up her finished A-Z cross stitch on an A5 panel of material Every morning (roughly!) in May, I asked my Instagram followers …
Selfie of Fiona in a mustard yellow top smiling and waving I’ve been neglecting this site of late - apologies! Quite a bit has happened since my last post - global pandemic and protests against racism aside. I’ve written my thesis, defended it, corrected it and now I’m waiting for the official bit of paper …
Most people have a desk as a place of work. I’m lucky enough to have three workspaces as a chemist: my desk, my lab bench, and my fume hood, all for different aspects of chemistry research. Today I’m going to give you a tour around my lab bench! My lab bench is used to carry …
2019 marks the UN’s International Year of the Periodic Table or #IYPT. It’s 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev presented his organisation of chemical elements to the world. The periodic table is used daily by chemists and other scientists as reference resource for the ingredients of the universe. Ancient Greeks defined “elements” as one of the …
Continue reading "What do the numbers on the periodic table mean?"
Over the course of a PhD, students are encouraged to leave the lab from time to time to go to conferences to learn about other kinds of research going on in their field. Science conferences gather researchers from academia and industry. In this post I will talk about the different conferences I went to in …
The Chemistry of a PhD 