Creating a winning proposal with the Daphne Jackson Trust

The Daphne Jackson Trust helps researchers returning from career breaks to get back into the lab. James Field spoke to Margaret O’Hara, a physicist at the University of Birmingham at the end of her 2-year part-time fellowship, about her experiences with the trust.

Margaret O’Hara’s career path isn’t typical—she worked as a physics teacher for 8 years before deciding to retrain as a medical physicist, working through a masters and a PhD.

This meant she was not as far clear of her PhD as she might have been when she and her partner began to discuss having children. “I didn’t have time to get postdoc positions under my belt,” she says. She found out she was pregnant not long after she gained her doctorate and began to talk to her department about what that meant for her work.