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Dr Kay Macleod won a Quantrell Award for PhD teaching and mentoring as she also balances running a leading lab at the University of Chicago.
The former Hermitage Academy pupil is now the Hospira Foundation Professor in the Ben May Department of Cancer Research.
On winning the award, she told the university: “I’ll always get asked questions in class that surprise me, and that make me re-evaluate the impact or importance of a particular aspect of research.
“But what’s also important the other way around is, if you’re not deeply in the research, you’re not going to be keeping the educational content of your classes up to date. It’s so important to stay current as we seek to inspire the next generation.”
Kay took charge of graduate training in cancer biology in 2013 and has since found students are more likely to pursue basic science careers after academia, such as in the pharmaceutical industry or in government service.
READ MORE: Dr Kay Macleod on research journey from Helensburgh to Chicago
So she has added classes to focus on translating lab discoveries to clinical applications and treatment for patients, she explained.
“We’re training these students to think about the clinical and translational relevance of their own research project,” she said, “where they take their own graduate research project and push it to the next level, whether that be a new diagnostic or therapeutic or even a new computational algorithm for quantifying data more rapidly and effectively as we see in AI approaches.”
But despite the changes to students, she added: “They’re all driven by the passion for scientific discovery and the excitement of new data they just got from a cool experiment. Watching that transition in a grad student as they become independent researchers is something I always find very rewarding.”
Kay did her PhD in Glasgow, then began a post-doctoral fellowship at MIT in 1993.
She started her own lab at the University of Chicago in 2002.
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