Research scientists balance two opposing forces at all times – a restless curiosity and an abiding patience. This curiosity fuels their drive to keep asking questions, to hypothesize and test and then hypothesize and test again. Because good science takes time, researchers also persevere patiently. Every day, they sort through data and press on toward the next insight, looking for a breakthrough moment. Scientists follow where the data leads, ever ready to change course.
To learn more about the people powering our science, we recently interviewed CSL scientists who are doing innovative, promising work.
Visit the People Powering Science home page.
You’ll meet Giorgia Jurisic Snijder, who’s working in drug discovery and looking for ways to help patients with kidney disease. She remembers walking the forests of Croatia with her mother, foraging for plants with medicinal properties.
Christopher Dumayne, a principal scientist in CSL’s cardiovascular and renal translational research team, is building research models that give our potential therapies their best shot at success. His own battle with leukemia taught him that: “Science isn’t abstract. It’s hope made real.”
Mollie Barrett thanks her mom, a nurse, for inspiring her research career. Today, she’s planning well-executed research trials in hematology, an evolving and complex area of medicine. Whether it’s hemophilia, sickle cell disease or hereditary hemochromatosis, Barrett feels that she’s “working to solve a puzzle.”
Trained in ballet, Olga Neumueller has a Ph.D. in protein-protein interactions and an appreciation for the discipline, accuracy and precision required in both dance and regulatory affairs. When we submit a regulatory application,” she said, “it comes down to the details.”
“We sometimes romanticize scientific breakthroughs, imagining that they occur because of a single genius or a singular lightbulb moment. But the reality of science looks more like a constellation than one shining star,” said Dr. Bill Mezzanotte, CSL’s Head of R&D.
These scientists are investigating research questions in real time, he said. “It generally takes multiple lines of inquiry and the layered accumulation of experience – and a whole lot of perseverance.”
