Hidden from view: being a scientific advisor for the emergency services

When it came to choosing his career, Stephen Yao was initially keen to stick to his comfort zone. After a PhD ‘synthesising [chemical] “building blocks” to help alleviate the bottleneck in fragment-based drug discovery’, he applied to roles at pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations.

Just six months into his first job however, Yao was made redundant, and there were no similar jobs available for him to move in to. This was when he first realised he’d been doing the same type of work for a long time and that he wanted to do something different.