Lewis is a senior clinical scientist in our Nottingham Laboratory. He is currently on a six-month secondment as principal clinical scientist. He shares some insights into his role, how the team functions and his career moves to date.
Firstly, what inspired you to a career in science?
I took my trainee role after a degree in genetics at the University of Nottingham. I always wanted to be a scientist; both my parents were scientists and I found genetics the most interesting area.
How long have you worked at Nottingham?
I started in the Nottingham Laboratory in December 2006, as trainee clinical scientist. At the time it was the Medical Genetics Laboratory for the East Midlands, though it later became part of the East Genomics Laboratory Hub (or East GLH) in 2019.
How did you progress to senior clinical scientist?
I took the Higher Specialist Scientist Training (HSST) programme between 2015 and 2020, which allowed me to learn whilst working as a clinical scientist. Alongside the HSST program, when in the laboratory, I was able to manage a variety of different disease testing services as well as contribute to quality and training in the department. This experience gave me the knowledge and skills required to get a role in the laboratory as senior clinical scientist in 2021.
Do you focus on specific rare diseases?
In my substantive role as senior clinical scientist, I oversee the services for various rare disease conditions including: spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes, myotonic dystrophy, uniparental disomy, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and haemochromatosis. This involves deciding the technical processes that should be used, prioritising samples, writing reports for the clinicians, or more often authorising the reports from other members of the team.
What else does your role entail?
In my secondment as principle clinical scientist for rare disease, I have more management responsibilities including overseeing the rare disease strategy, ensuring our management structures best fit the demands of the service and leading various transformational projects. I report into the service manager.
Currently as a department we are introducing further cross working and collaboration between the cytogenetics and molecular genetics teams to ensure resilience in the service. There is an ongoing project to align our two quality management systems together, which will help simplify processes for staff.
In my substantive and secondment role about half my time is dedicated to training, in my role as training officer for the genomics department. I support the continuous professional development of our scientist trainees (STPs) and healthcare scientists and support those who are developing their portfolios.
How large is the team in Nottingham?
Approximately half of the team in the Nottingham lab - around 35 - focus on inherited and rare diseases; with the others focusing on acquired cancer. I work with four other senior scientists on rare disease. The whole team is extremely dedicated in the work they do; we are a close-knit team that works well together.
What are the benefits of working in a small laboratory?
There is a great variety of work and as senior scientists we need to authorise reports for many diseases. We also work across the whole department so there is never a dull day!
We also need to have quite a large input into quality processes, as these are vital to ensure a well-functioning laboratory, and often get involved in generating and checking activity figures.
How has genomic testing changed since you started in your role?
The role and profile of genomics in healthcare has grown enormously and the technology involved has changed dramatically. The number of conditions that genomics can influence has increased, with sample numbers growing quite rapidly.
The laboratory is run quite differently now with greater regulation; we continually need to work more efficiently to meet the increasing demand. It is certainly an interesting area of science to work in!
Working as part of the East GLH allows us to further scale up to support greater patient numbers. With the move to large panels as well as whole genome sequencing (WGS) for some conditions, some of this work gets sent on to the Cambridge Genomics Laboratory, though for some of these services the results still come back to Nottingham for analysis.
We share some multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTs) with Cambridge scientists to ensure common practice and the best access to expertise across the region and work within various task and finish groups, for example bioinformatics, to support the ongoing data requirements.
In summary what do you like most about your role, and what are the challenges?
I really enjoy the training side of my role - working with the STPs coordinating their rotations, assessing their training activities which includes professional practice as well as scientific responsibilities such as reporting and analysing diseases.
In terms of challenges, being a small team, we need to be resilient. We have to cover quite a range of areas including taking responsibility for recruitment and finance; it is interesting though can be challenging at times to balance the competing demand.
How do you relax and switch off from work?
I enjoy cross-fit and spending time with my family. Nottingham itself is great to get around as it isn't too big. I like being close to the Peak District and we have good transport access to other parts of the UK.