Professor Meritxell Canals is supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences Professorship Scheme. Here, she talks about her experiences of the Academy’s mentoring programme.
My career, as that of many others in biomedical sciences, has brought me around the world. I did my PhD in Spain, post-docs in Scotland and the Netherlands, started my lab in Australia, and after a sabbatical in New York I finally obtained a permanent position in the UK. I am now a Professor of Cellular Pharmacology, Centre of Membrane Protein and Receptors at the University of Nottingham, supported in part by the Academy of Medical Sciences Professorship Scheme.
I have been lucky to have had good mentors throughout my career. These mentorship relationships however always previously started and developed around shared research interests. Up until 2019, my mentors were also my collaborators: not supervisors or line managers, but people with whom I got along very well. I enjoyed doing science with them and therefore we could not only work together but also, I could count on them for advice when I needed it.
I grasped the opportunity of accessing mentoring through the Academy of Medical Sciences as soon as it was presented to me. I was looking for a particular mentor; a woman doing basic biomedical research in the UK who was in a position where I was able to imagine myself in the future. Upon my appointment as a Professor, I was looking for someone who had also taken leadership positions within an institution and within the UK research community.
I am still amazed at how well the pairing worked; I could not have hoped for a better mentor!
Our mentoring relationship started at the same time as the COVID19 pandemic, which meant that our meetings had to be online from the start. However, as both my mentor and I are early risers, we managed to have nice cups of coffee early in the morning before the rest of the house got up, in the early days of “working from home”.
There are immense benefits to a positive mentoring relationship. My mentor plays so many roles! She is a sounding board of my thoughts about my future, about my workload and how to manage it, about my science, about having a young family and wanting to set a good example at home and in the lab. I look forward to my meetings with her: these occasions give me the chance to pause and reflect on my work and my professional trajectory.
See all our mentoring case studies here and find out about our mentoring programme here.
