"I'll say to any student who's feeling a bit like a fish out of water: you deserve to be here"

Professor Ijeoma Uchegbu grew up in London and Nigeria, where she completed her degree in pharmacy. She returned to the UK to do her PhD, while raising three young children as a single mother. Her first lectureship was at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. She then moved to University College London (UCL) to take up the role of Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanosience. She becomes the 7^th President at Wolfson, and is the third Black Head of House (College) in Cambridge.

I get the sense that you love what you’re doing and have a real passion for the science?

Yes, it still excites me to get a paper accepted and published. We have one coming out next week. It still creates excitement. I’m focussed on trying to apply my science to real world problems and making medicines with fewer side effects. It's about getting the drug to where it ought to be in order to do its work and we use nanoparticles to do that. We're trying to make medicines to treat diseases that will ultimately lead to blindness. We’re also looking at pain relief where the pain is really severe and forces people to turn to opioids, morphine, fentanyl or oxycodone. These medicines are very effective at relieving pain, but they also have a lot of side effects. We have 40 opioid deaths a week in the UK from opiate poisoning and in the US it's about 80,000 a year because they have a bigger opioid crisis.

And I suppose if you have side effects it might put you off taking the drug so the condition doesn’t get any better?

Exactly , and yes, around 50% of people with chronic conditions don’t take their medicines in the right way. So you find that a lot of people with chronic conditions are not actually being helped by their therapeutics because they're not taking them in the right way. I know someone who has had a serious stroke and then decided that the medicines caused so many side effects they wouldn’t take them.

During your time in science you must have seen many changes, particularly in the backgrounds of people going into it. When you started out you must have been in a minority, not just as a Black woman, but simply as a woman?

Yes, quite - in the beginning when I used to go to conferences, there wouldn't be a Black face there at all. I mean, man or woman, especially conferences in the UK. Sometimes you would go to a conference in the US and you might see the odd Black scientist. I’ve begun to see more and more scientists from ethnic minority backgrounds, either from Black African or Black Caribbean backgrounds. It's gone from 1 to maybe 4 or 5 in the room, but there could be more than five hundred people in that room! So it is changing, but it's not changing as fast as you would hope. And here’s the thing, if you have a homogeneous group making decisions as to what science should be doing, it means we're not solving all the problems that we could be solving if we had a more diverse group of people doing that science. You also don’t find many people from working-class backgrounds, who are first-generation, that are scientists. Which means that when we're thinking about diseases of poverty, they're not really at the top of the agenda because most people are middle class and they probably don't know what it really means to be affected by those diseases.

I recently met a group of scientists here in Cambridge who’d created their own book celebrating their diversity and it was remarkable how their different backgrounds and journeys bonded them more as a team…is that your experience?

Well, there’s the evidence! We don’t have lone scientists like Newton anymore making big discoveries, we have teams and there is reliable data that shows that when you have teams from different backgrounds and different geographic locations, you end up having more citations in the paper. If you have a lot of citations in the paper, it means that lots of people have read it and even if they've read it to criticise it, that's still impact.

When you came to Cambridge earlier this year to deliver the Gloria Carpenter lecture you referred to the work you’d got involved in to improve diversity at UCL. Did you feel at the time it was a bit like a poisoned chalice?

Hmm, well yes, in a way. As a Black woman I should have been very much aware of the fact that there weren't many people like me working at a high level who had their own funding but it didn’t feel like it was my problem. When I was asked to get involved in the race equality discussion at UCL I thought this is a problem for someone in management, not someone who's trying to run a lab. And then I went to the first meeting and saw the data and yes, I was really shocked. I couldn't believe that so few Black and ethnic minority academics were promoted compared to white academics. I couldn't believe that students come in with the same qualification and some of them, when you look through a race lens, wouldn't get the top degree of First Class honours. I was in a state of disbelief. Then I was really horrified. And I thought, well, you've got to do something about it. I offered myself up for a senior role and eventually secured a budget and small team and the leaders of the faculties and the different units started to pay attention to the race equity problem. We suggested some things they could to change the picture and were able to make a difference to student awards and staff progression.

Cambridge has improved the diversity of its undergraduate intake in recent years but a lot of Black students tell me it can be overwhelming and a bit alienating when they come here. Many feel this sense of imposter syndrome. Can you relate to that, and what would your advice be to them?

Well I think the first thing to bear in mind is that impostor syndrome can affect different people at any time. You know there are many people who will say I didn't think I actually belonged in there. Women tend to say this quite a bit. It’s something a lot of phenomenal women, who have led national organisations in our country, have said but then they usually become empowered and find their voice. I’m not saying men don’t experience this too it’s just I haven’t met many men who’ve actually said it. So the first thing to bear in mind is that this is not unique to a certain individual. Of course, it may be amplified when you find that you are a minority in there, and then you think to yourself, well, if I'm the only person who looks like me in this space, do I really belong here? And have I got much to contribute? But I always say to people, let's think about the worst-case scenario. Let's think about a case where you really do believe you're there due to tokenism. To that I say you've got one job…and that's to go from token to expert/hero in 30 seconds! The moment you walk into the meeting your only goal is to demonstrate that you have a lot to contribute, because you definitely do. And that's what I'll say to any student who's feeling a bit like a fish out of water. You deserve to be here. You've gone through a very competitive process, probably one of the most competitive processes in the world, to get here. So, if you end up in such a place with your qualifications (often 3 or 4 A*s), you TOTALLY deserve to be there. I think that's the best advice I can give.

So tell me what you're looking forward to most about coming to Wolfson?

Oh…for me this is an incredibly exciting opportunity. When Kevin Greenbank, the College’s vice-president, called me to tell me I had got the post, I was just screaming with joy. I'm really looking forward to demonstrating that I can make a contribution to life in the UK at this level. Even if it’s just my grandchildren who see that, and think to themselves right I now know what to aim for, that would be enough for me.