Oban,

It may be a small pretty place by the sea in a fairly remote part of Scotland, but people come from all over the UK and the world to work with Aquapharm! Honest!

The Aquapharm team.

Kim McKendrick	Mohamed Issouf	Karen Jukes	Liming Yan
Richard Hodgson	Andrew Desbois	Alison Hardie

If you wanted to work for a company like Aquapharm you’d need to have the right science education – at least a degree in science (microbiology would be REALLY helpful!) and enough experience of working in a lab to be useful to the company right away. So a summer job doing the basic lab work of pipetting out and making the plates the microbes grow on would be brilliant.

Kim McKendrick

Kim is Aquapharm’s Microbial Curator.

"I look after the Library of microbes, and I’m in charge of ‘sampling’ – or going out to look for more microbes around the coast, or researching into new stuff to grow the microbes in. My favourite bit of the job is that it’s really satisfying to do a job one step at a time in the right order, and know the results are down to you being totally methodical.

I like working for a small company, because you get more variety in your day to day work, and are positively encouraged to come up with your own ideas about how things should be done. And of course you get out and about!

I did a degree in Botany (plant life), and I was a technician in a botanical laboratory for a while which gave me some great lab skills to work here."

Mohamed Issouf

Or Mo-Mo to his friends at Aquapharm, is French, and comes from the French Island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. He’s Aquapharm’s Scientific Officer.

"I studied in France, getting a Biochemistry degree and a Masters of Science (MSc) in Microbiology, and I’ve been a student in Scotland too, I love it here, it’s fabulous, well perhaps not when it rains, but most of the time! Oban is a bit small, I wouldn’t want to live there if I worked in a shop, but I love my job, so it’s fine.

Being in at the beginning of Aquapharm, when there were just four of us, was really exciting. A lot of graduates wouldn’t be so trusted, but here Aquapharm really gave me a chance to carry out my own projects, to be independent and to be part of a team at the same time.

I heard about Aquapharm on the science grapevine, and I really liked the sound of it and applied to work here. My job is to carry out the Lab work on a project, I work with Richard a lot, and I get to have ideas about how we do things, and the way we go about doing them, what we call the protocol. There’s no set pattern of work here, every morning I know I’ll have a different day in one way or another – that’s good!"

Karen Jukes

Karen is a Production Scientist.

"I’m the only really local member of staff! I was brought up in Lochgilphead just up the road from here. I graduated in 2003 in Microbiology and went to work for Baxter’s Soup as a food microbiologist, which was OK but I really wanted to move back to this area. Microbiology jobs are few and far between here as you can imagine, so Aquapharm was perfect and I applied.

I’ve not been here long, and I’m looking forward to new challenges, different science and having some young people to work with! Also to working in this nice building!

A job in science isn’t like you think, not like the stereotypical nerds you expect at all, you meet some amazing people, and it’s a proper hands on job. My work here is to grow and freeze organisms in flasks, for other companies and scientists who want to buy them. That’s what the job title means – production, as in, like a factory!"

Liming Yan

Liming is the Principal Investigator at Aquapharm.

"I work a lot with Richard Hogson who’s the R & D Manager, but my job is more focussed on the science going on in the lab. I work on the ‘anti-infectives’ the MRSA end of things. I’m really interested in cracking this problem.

I grew up in China, and studied medicine. This is because I had a teacher who had cancer and I had the ambition for 8 years to find a treatment for this disease. Doctors in China have too many patients to find cures, they are too busy following whatever treatment they already use. So I stopped my medical career and went into research – there was more freedom to follow my goal that way. I went to Japan to study molecular pathology; how diseases develop in the body at the smallest level.

Then I went to work at Phillips Lighting in China. Industrial R & D! It wasn’t what I wanted to do but I earned lots of money, which helped to support me when I got to Herriot-Watt University to do my PhD. I really wanted the science I had learned to have a practical application, and finding new antibiotics is very practical. Now what I’m working on is very cutting edge science, finding out how bacteria can be triggered into producing anti biotic substances – it’s not been reported before!

With my science skills I could work anywhere in the world now. I was in Edinburgh for six years and I loved it. I hope in five years time I’ll still be here, it is exactly the very work I want to be doing, and it will allow my ideas to contribute to society.

You need patience, and perseverance in a science career, there is a Chinese saying ‘Perseverance is victory!’" That’s really true in science!

Richard Hodgson

Richard’s from Halifax, and is Aquapharm’s Research and Development Manager.

"I didn’t start out wanting to be a scientist – actually I wanted to be a historian, but I was hopeless at essay writing, so I studied Biology, Chemistry and Maths at A’Level. Actually I was pretty hopeless at some of the pure maths too, but it hasn’t held me back!

I did a degree in biochemistry and microbiology at the University of Central Lancashire, and an MSc at Portsmouth University specialising in the bio-deterioration of materials. Deterioration of products and other man made materials is bad – because they stop being able to do their job. It’s different from Degrading – as in biodegrading – that’s just something breaking down to lessen its environmental impact.

I’m really happy I ended up in science, I’ve had some very interesting and quite well paid jobs in my career so far. I worked on oil pipeline bio-films. (A bio-film is layer upon layer of a community of micro-organisms that form on any surface – Here’s a good explanation http://www.erc.montana.edu/.)

If you look at that link above you’ll see some teeth – you all have a biofilm in your mouth! I actually worked on what to put in toothpaste to improve the way biofilms can be controlled in the mouth at a company called Unilever. If you brush your teeth properly though you don’t get much of a biofilm build up (known as plaque in the mouth) – so they decided it wasn’t worth all the research to add anything new and expensive to toothpaste. I got to travel a lot with that job at Unilever – India, China, all over.

I’m in charge of the work that needs to happen in the labs here, and work with Liming a lot. It’s great working in a small company like this one because you get a chance to have a go at all angles of the operation. It makes for very interesting days! I definitely aim to be here in five years. I love the place too. I’m thinking of getting a boat to live on in the marina here. Maybe ‘Location Location Location’ could find me and my wife and baby an ideal combination of house and boat?!"

Andrew Desbios

PhD Student, Gatty Marine Lab, St Andrew’s University.

"I’m doing my PhD in Marine Biotechnology, studying the biological defence systems in single celled marine algae. It’s a side project for Aquapharm, but it’s related to what they are doing so they’re helping to support me through my PhD…you can see how it fits into the overall project here, these bugs' defence systems could also lead to anti-bacterials. I’m not here all the time, just for a few days a month – I get to use the equipment here, especially the chromatography machine. Aquapharm gets the benefit of me setting up systems in the lab that they’ll be able to use in the future.

At the moment they’re using the HPLC machine (that’s High Performance Liquid Chromatography) to look for what they know they’re looking for. The way I’ve set it up now, they’ll be able to put unknown compounds into the machine and find out what they are made of – you know when you do chromatography at school? When you separate out chemicals up a piece of chromatography paper? Well, this is the same but on a really sophisticated scale.

The main benefit for me is that I can use the kind of equipment we don’t have at the university. Aquapharm, because they support me, get to own some of the IP = (Intellectual Property Rights – in other words, who owns the ideas and research and who gets to make money out of it eventually).

I’m definitely going to stick with science, that’s why I’m doing a PhD, so I’ll have the most options about what I do next."

Alison Hardie

Production Scientist.

"This is my first science job, I just came here from Edinburgh where I studied microbiology for four years. It was a bit of a shock moving to Oban - a good one I mean! I’m an outdoors person, I love walking and having lots of hills to climb.

I grow the organisms that produce the carotenoid colours, and it’s my job to experiment with their environments and so on to see how we can get the best out of them. I have two I’ve been given to work on called Ginger and Weegy. That’s not their official names, that’s their pet names. I’m very fond of my bugs! I find myself talking to them sometimes – encouraging them!

It’s all trial and error, finding out how to get the best yields from them. You can feed them lots, and get a high cell yield (that means they grow and divide rapidly) but that doesn’t mean you get lots of the colour out of them. Also if you get the colour from them at the wrong time it can degrade in the light, so you need to know when the best time to do that is.

It’s great working in a small company like this because you get a chance to have lots of responsibility for different things – in some lab jobs you can end up doing the same thing all the time. It’s great experience for a recent graduate to find out what they might like to do. Also everything’s new here, so I get a chance to contribute to how things are done.

It’s a real pleasure to get up in the morning, knowing I’m coming here to work and learn new skills. I’m really lucky to have found something I love."



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