I left St Swithun’s school in 1992 which probably seems like a lifetime ago for young readers of this article.  Becoming a scientist is not a quick journey or an easy one, but it is incredibly interesting, fun and rewarding.  I am not sure of many other professions where you are essentially paid to explore the world around you and to unravel stories of your choosing.  I give a brief outline of some of the key components in my story so far that have led me over the last quarter of a century to becoming a Professor of Microbiology at the University of Leicester.
 
After St Swithun’s I spent a very happy four years studying biology at the University of Dundee.  I obtained a first class honours degree (in 1996) that then bounced me to an MSc at the University of Edinburgh where I studied Plant Taxonomy.  During this time I became fascinated with identifying new genetic markers to unravel how plants were related to each other, I focussed on African Violets and established how they had speciated throughout Kenya and Tanzania.  I developed my ideas further during my PhD at the University of Leicester (1997-2001) where I established how related plants were that looked very similar but were found on different continents.  This work can all be considered under the discipline of ‘Molecular Ecology’, where genetics can be understood to reveal unseen relationships. 
 
At this point I felt that plant evolution happened a bit too slowly for my liking.  I wanted to study evolution in a simpler system so in 2001 I headed to the University of Warwick and worked for a Professor of Microbiology, Profrossor Nick Mann who studied cyanobacteria which are photosynthetic bacteria that ultimately became the chloroplasts (green bits) in plants.  These bacteria are very important for producing oxygen for our planet Earth, but importantly for me, have small genomes and were nice to study.  In trying to work out how they lived and produced oxygen in the oceans, and how they evolved I needed to study viruses as it was known that viruses infected them.  I then had to learn heaps about all bacterial viruses and in doing this became transfixed about how viruses can impact the bacterial world they inhabit.  Learning about viruses of my cyanobacteria took me to meetings all over the world and in one meeting in 2001 I came across the mind blowing concept that viruses could be used to treat bacterial infections in humans.
 
The dogma is that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.  And so it is possible to find viruses that kill bacteria that make us sick, and for us to use these viruses to specifically kill bacteria that are hard to treat.  This is an approach that is older than antibiotics and these viruses were isolated over 100 years ago and used to treat infections before antibiotics were discovered but in most parts of the world the technology had been forgotten.   There is now a big revival of this technology which is particularly important in our increasing age of antibiotic resistance. I now run a research group with a focus on understanding how bacterial viruses work, with the ultimate aim of exploiting them.  My work will hopefully be a part of a global international effort to help solve the crisis of antibiotic resistance. 
 
After I determined then that I would make a career in this area it took a me several more years of working at Warwick, and for a few months in Scripts Institute Of La Jolla.  I then got my own position at the University of Leicester where I was appointed as a lecturer in 2006.  I was appointed as a Reader in 2011 and a full professor in 2015.  Approximately a third of my time is taken up by teaching and I teach environmental microbiology and bacteriophage biology to students at all stages from undergraduate to PhD level.  Most of my work however is research, I run a team of on average about 15 scientists, a mixture of PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and technical staff.  We are like spokes of a wheel as we try and unravel how viruses work.  This takes us right from basic ecology and evolution, still my main driving passion, through to work with DNA, RNA, protein, structural biology, and then right through to drug development and applied applications of viruses.  No day is the same I’ve been lucky enough to work with some wonderful scientists all over the world.
 
I didn’t leave school wanting to be a microbiologist but I did love biology.  I’d had a good grounding in biology and chemistry at St Swithun’s.  We had a lot of fun in the classes working with Drosophila.  I also did my first project in microbiology where we were given free rein to design our own project and I fermented various beans and rice in order to see what that did to their protein content.  I also remember one particularly fun visit to what was then Kingston polytechnic where we went to look at cutting edge science equipment in a university; mass spectrometers and machines used that nuclear magnetic resonance to generate images of proteins.  I think this led to me wanting to be able to use this type of equipment myself.
 
I recommend that pupils who have enquiring minds and a sense of adventure consider becoming a scientist.  As I said the journey is not always easy so I suggest following what you really enjoy and trying different things to find out what this is.  You also have to stay open minded to opportunities when they present themselves whether it is travelling to far flung parts of the world to work on specific projects, or having sandwiches with Brian Cox in the Green room at Broadcasting House before being interviewed about your research in front of a large live audience!  He is just as lovely in real life as he seems on TV by the way, and asks good questions!
 
For more details about my current bacteriophage research please see this short clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP1c7HJpeSU
 
More can be seen about my work on my website: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/iii/people/dr-martha-clokie