Interviews usually take place the last Friday of the month around lunchtime and are co-organised by the PDC and local postdoc reps and committees from all the MHLS Faculty's Schools and Centres, to ensure relevance to all. They take place via MS Teams and involve set questions asked by the chair and time for attendees to ask additional questions via the chat. While guests are usually chosen to have a PhD background, all staff and students are welcome.

The May 2021 interview is organised by the PDC representatives from the School of Biological Sciences (Linda Oyama) and from the School of Nursing and Midwifery (David Scott and Malcolm Brown). It will feature Dr Panchali Kanvatirth, Research Scientist HTS at AstraZeneca, and Dr Janet Diffin, Retail Analyst (Consumer Protection) for the Northern Ireland Utility Regulator. 

Panchali is a research scientist at AstraZeneca working on translational research which can contribute to the therapeutic pipeline. She completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham, utilising high-througput screening approaches to identify targets for Mycobacteria. While a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, she collaborated with industrial researchers and was awarded the BBSRC flexible talent mobility grant to work with AstraZeneca on a short-term mass cytometry project. 

Janet completed her PhD and postdoc in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen's before taking on the role of evaluator for project ECHO with Hospice UK, managing and evaluating health and social care networks in Northern Ireland. She now works within the Retail and Consumer Protection directorate, provide analysis and policy advice relating to the regulation of the energy retail sector. Janet also owns the Twitter account @PostDocJobsNI, in which she shares Northern Ireland job adverts for roles of potential interest to postdocs.

Registered participants will be sent a Teams link a couple of days before the event but should hold the time in their calendar right away.

Attendees will be able to ask questions using the MS Teams chat.

If the quality of the sound allows it and the guests agree, the conversation could later be made accessible as a podcast (but cannot be guaranteed).