Building the future of separation science

Is it her sharp gaze or the fact that, even as a director at AstraZeneca, she likes to pore over lab data? Speaking to Jennifer Kingston, one gets the sense that not much escapes her attention – except, as it turns out, the email in her spam folder announcing she had won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2025 Technical Excellence Prize for delivering a cutting-edge purification laboratory, championing sustainable methods and establishing a degree apprenticeship programme.

‘It’s just really nice to get a pat on the back,’ she admits with a smile. As group leader in separation science for oncology drug discovery, she is used to other types of rewards – often simply the quiet satisfaction of having cracked a new chemistry problem, of watching her team thrive and being recognised for delivering complex projects. Besides quality control (QC) analysis, her section specialises in drug molecule purification using column chromatography, with a focus on automation and on chiral and achiral method development. Yet it’s the ‘why’ of her work that truly drives her. ‘It’s such an uplifting thing,’ she says of before-and-after scans that show promising results in certain clinical trial patients.

Challenging chemistry 

Kingston credits the start of her pharmaceutical career, 25 years ago, to a famous blue pill. After her undergraduate degree at the University of Liverpool, UK, she enjoyed tracking water pollution at the brand-new National Rivers Authority, falling in love with analytical chemistry amid moving boxes and half-assembled lab equipment. Yet, in her early thirties and fresh from a PhD on passive sampling techniques for organic pollutants at the University of Portsmouth, UK, she was eager for something new. Reading about Viagra’s serendipitous origin story, and picturing ‘the excitement of the discovery units’, she realised drug development could offer the intellectual stimulation she was looking for.

‘If you want a career change, go for it, really. Because you’re a long time working if it’s not the [right] role for you’ she reflects on her change of trajectory. Entering a PhD after working in industry gave her confidence in her skills, and clarity of purpose: ‘Just to go and spend three years doing some research, it’s absolutely luxurious. I’d recommend it to anybody that’s interested in science.’

Next came a role at Pfizer and a career-defining encounter with Terry Berger. ‘Sorry, this may be a bit boring for you, but this is kind of my passion’, she apologises – unnecessarily – as she explains how Berger transformed supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) into the ‘no brainer, better, more efficient technique’ she has been championing since. Using supercritical carbon dioxide modified with co-solvents as the mobile phase, SFC provides remarkable selectivity in chiral separations. ‘And on top of that, it’s greener and more sustainable,’ she says, producing less waste, using less solvent and sourcing recycled carbon dioxide from industry.

Kingston was initially too junior and ‘inexperienced at influencing people’ to get SFC adopted in her workplace – she had no such difficulties, however, in her next positions at Merck Sharp & Dohme and Novartis. When she arrived at AstraZeneca in 2014, she was ready to bring the technology to existing Cambridge sites and to plan its large-scale expansion at the Discovery Centre, which opened in 2021 and is now AstraZeneca’s largest UK research centre. ‘How do you plumb liquid CO₂ at 60 bar through a building?’ she muses, recalling one of the many challenges she faced designing this new chromatographic facility. Her team now sits ‘right in the middle’ of an open space that houses oncology teams once scattered across Cambridge, fostering unexpected and stimulating collaborations.

From apprentices to scientists

‘What about the [degree] apprenticeship scheme?’ suggests Kingston, as the conversation winds through her other achievements. The three-year programme, hosted by the early oncology group, is clearly close to her heart. At Novartis, she had noticed what apprentices could do ‘if we unlocked their potential’, and how much they were valued. With colleague Paul Turner, she pitched the idea to senior management in 2016, arguing such an opportunity had previously existed at AstraZeneca.

She talks fondly of the more than 20 students who have gone through the scheme – the first now a chemistry teacher, another a senior-level scientist in the company, and the most recent recruit, to whom she had just given a pep talk that morning. ‘When we started talking about apprenticeships, people would say, “I’m not sure I’ve got a role that’s suitable for an apprentice”,’ she recalls. However, the whole organisation has seen how quickly apprentices can adapt and benefit a team. ‘If you [take] high-potential individuals, they could become scientists in their own right,’ Kingston says. Yet, she stresses that an apprenticeship isn’t for everybody: ‘It’s for people that have a drive for science, that want to ask why.’

The programme, she says, benefits the organisation as much as the apprentices. Inexperienced minds probe knowledge gaps, question assumptions and offer new perspectives. ‘It brings that curiosity back to the more experienced people’, she says, pushing mentors to reflect on what they enjoy and may want to do next. As for Kingston, the answer is clear. ‘We are drugging the undruggable now, you know. We’re building molecules that nobody thought we could build, to treat diseases in a way that nobody thought we could.’ She grins: ‘I don’t need to look for a new challenge, because it’s kind of here.’