My Working Day: Dr Sally Cudmore, general manager of the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre in the BioSciences Institute, Cork, proves 'not all scientists are 40-year-old men.
At the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre we are studying gastrointestinal health, trying to interface food and medicine.
We are looking at the bacteria that are resident within the gut and trying to figure out how they are important to health, and also there is an implication that some of them are involved in disease as well, such as inflammatory bowel disease. We also interact with food and pharma industries, so the consumer will ultimately benefit from the research we do.
My role as general manager involves a bit of everything. There is a lot of admin-type work which involves organising contracts, visas, invoices and purchasing. Budget is a big part of it, making sure we keep our spending on track. Then there's the more exciting side - being involved in management meetings, education and outreach, scientific reports, school visits, you name it.
I spend around half of my time working on education and outreach activities. Last year we visited 77 primary schools, making contact with more than 4,000 children. We want to try to impart the message to the kids that the majority of bacteria are beneficial.
All staff in the centre visit schools. We try to pair staff members on school visits, put a male with a female, somebody senior with somebody junior and somebody Irish with somebody non-Irish. We want to give kids the message that not all scientists are 40-year-old men.
We have a number of experiments for the kids to do: we get them to pretend they sneezed and we put a glob of hair gel in their hands containing glitter to represent microbes. Then they shake hands down the row to see how far the stuff spreads. We then get them to wash their hands and they see it doesn't spread any further. We're trying to impart how important it is to wash your hands and how easy it is to pass germs between each other.
We organise a lot of conferences and I'd be involved in that side of things, as well as strategy planning and writing grant proposals for various organisations.
It's the kind of job where you have a huge amount of interaction with people, people of different cultures and nationalities and that's also very nice. There is a big span in the type of research that's based here which is one of the things that I think makes it work quite nicely. They are a great bunch to work with. These are researchers that are at the cutting edge of what they do but are very human and normal about it.
I enjoy the challenges that come up every day and trying to beat them as they arise; there's a certain amount of firefighting that goes on. But probably the part I enjoy the most is interacting with the schoolchildren, helping to mould some of the potential scientists of the future. That definitely is a lot of fun.