An update from Emily received recently -
I was extremely lucky to be invited to visit the Novartis pharmaceutical company headquarters in Basel, Switzerland in April to give a presentation on my recent PhD work. It was really a great stroke of luck how this opportunity arose - but essentially a collaborator from England coordinated this opportunity for me, and my PhD supervisors at Monash were incredibly supportive.
I spent four days at the campus, touring the (INCREDIBLE!) facilities and hearing from others about new research in the field. My field of research is called 'Physiologically-Based Pharmacokinetics', which is basically a mathematical modelling technique which we use to simulate how a human will respond to a medicine before they take it - hoping to eventually support 'personalised medicine' and prescribing decisions of which drug and dose suits each individual person best.
After an incredible week seeing the sights of Basel I went to Zurich for a couple of days, before off to Innsbruck, Austria to visit my German exchange sister Emely who we hosted in Bendigo back in 2017 at Bendigo Senior Secondary College! Emely has since moved from Germany to Austria for her studies, and we've kept in touch, although hadn't seen each other since 2017! It was instant connection from the train station when she picked me up - and we didn't stop talking for the whole week, we had so much to catch up on! We are quite similar people and get on very well, so it was a pleasure to reconnect and see some awe-inspiring sights of her part of the world. I also enjoyed using my German language which I haven't entirely given up on since school!
