A decade ago, Mel was running a successful market intelligence agency while raising her two young children. Then, one evening in 2016, she received a telephone call that changed everything.
Mel said: “My mum phoned to tell me that my sister’s breast cancer had returned. Not only had it come back, but it had spread to her bones, meaning it was incurable. She was just 39 years old.”
“Becca’s diagnosis changed my perspective. It brought home how precious good health is and made me think carefully about how I wanted to spend my career.”
Motivated to pursue a new career with greater purpose, Mel returned to academia in 2018, enrolling on a part-time Master’s in Health Research at the University of Bristol while continuing to run her business and care for her family.
Returning to university in her late 30s was a daunting prospect.
She said: “I remember queueing up to register for my Master’s degree with a lot of 18-year-olds and wondering ‘what on earth am I doing here?’”
Just four months into her Master’s, Becca died.
Reflecting on her sister’s support, Mel said: “Becca was really excited about what I was doing. Before she died, the first essay I wrote for my Master’s was on breast cancer, and I wrote it for her. I got 90% for it which I think was because I was just so motivated. She asked if she could read it and it was really important that she was able to.”
Despite her loss, Mel completed her Master’s before securing Wellcome funding to undertake a PhD in Epidemiology at Bristol. During her doctoral studies, her family experienced further heartbreak when her mother-in-law Janet also died from breast cancer.
Throughout her PhD, Mel developed the analytical skills that now underpin her work as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Queen Mary University of London to help create tools that support GPs in identifying patients who may have cancer and need urgent referral.
Her final PhD project was published in the leading medical journal The BMJ – an achievement she describes as being “totally beyond anything that I could ever have imagined.”
Following her doctorate, Mel completed a six-month Wellcome-funded Transition Fellowship at Bristol, working with the charity Make 2nds Count to survey people living with metastatic breast cancer about the research priorities that matter most to them.
Mel, from Malmesbury, Wiltshire, said: “Returning to university transformed my life. It gave me a career with real purpose and the opportunity to contribute to research that has the potential to improve cancer diagnosis and patient outcomes.
“Looking ahead, I hope to secure funding to carry out research into metastatic breast cancer inspired by the experiences of my sister and mother-in-law and driven by a desire to make a difference for patients and their families.”
For Mel, graduating with a PhD represents the achievement of a goal that has taken years of determination, resilience, and self-belief.
She said: “I feel like I have been working towards this for nearly 10 years and I feel such a sense of achievement. Looking back, what I am most proud of was keeping going and having faith in myself that I could manage my studies whilst working and having young children. All the way through, it was about doing things that scared me but doing them anyway. It was a daunting step, but I rediscovered how much I loved learning and challenging myself.
“I owe it to Becca and other people who don’t get the chance to live their dreams to ensure I make the most of every minute I have.”