Senior Academic Fellow in Pharmacology
University of Edinburgh

Patrick H

00:02 Yeah my name’s Paddy Hadoke I’m a senior academic fellow in pharmacology, it’s a bit of a mouthful and I work for the University of Edinburgh.

00:10 It involves a combination of designing and implementing research projects and teaching graduate, undergraduate and visiting students and also supervising post doctoral research scientists. I’ve always followed my own interests really I’ve been very much taken with the biological sciences and sciences generally. I was very interested in the workings of a human body, I did pretty well at O level and got O levels in all the sciences that I needed and maths and also had interests in history and geography and the usual sort of broader range of things. I then went on and did A levels which didn’t go so well I spent a bit too much time playing rugby I think and, and enjoying myself so I had to have a couple of goes at my A levels, which limited my choices a little bit and after that I went to do a degree in applied chemistry at what was then the Newcastle Polytechnic, which I fell on my feet with really cos it was a fantastically hands on course, we spent a lot of time in the lab and actually getting practical experience of doing lab work and, and that proved to me and reassured me that it was actually being in the lab doing experiments that I enjoyed doing. Part of that degree was a sandwich year in industry so I was able to go out into industry, spend a year working in my case in the pharmaceutical industry and that gave me again a really good insight in to what was involved in pharmaceuticals and what you needed to get on if you went into a, an industrial setting with applied chemistry and that, that was a big factor in my deciding that what I wanted to do and what I needed to do was to go on an do a, a research degree and so from that, from my degree I went on and looked around at several options and eventually took a PHD at Glasgow, in Glasgow at Strathclyde University.

01:59 I always knew I wanted to go into further education I was very interested in the, the science subjects and I knew that getting a university education would broaden the options that I had and make things easier in the future and I also wanted to experience life as a student to see what it was like, it sounded like it was good fun and it was good fun. And so you know it was, it was a combination of things really but there was never any doubt in my mind that that was the path I wanted to follow.

02:27 Both my parents were University trained, well hospital trained. One was a, a doctor and one was a nurse and they, they both went through Guys Hospital and so they spoke you know strongly of University experiences and it sounded good fun.

02:42 I started playing rugby when I was about 11 when I went to secondary school, I’d always played a lot of sport and there was quite a competitive steak in our family and so my elder brother particularly and myself played a lot of rugby at school and then for the, the town team and when I started doing A levels that coincided with my actually starting to play rugby for Ludlow Town and then in the second year I was vice captain of the 3rd team and then when I re-sat I was captain of the 3rd team which takes up quite a lot of time, a lot of juggling people about and trying to find enough players for a Saturday, which sort of gets in the way of studying and then obviously there’s a social life around that and it was, it was good fun it messed up the A levels a couple of times but it was quite an entertaining couple of years.

03:28 My intention when I was at school would have been to try to get into medicine that was really knocked on the head by my A levels and so there was a certain amount of when I went from A levels to Newcastle and making the best of what I could and surprising myself really by how much I enjoyed the applied chemistry course at Newcastle. But I don’t think I’d have ever seen myself going into a research position because I, I knew very little about it to be honest.