Dr Joanna Denbigh

Biography

I graduated from the University of Salford with a 1st Class MChem in Analytical Chemistry, during which time I was awarded a MRSEC scholarship to carry out a 3-month research project at the University of Nebraska, USA and I spent a dedicated placement year working in the Drug Metabolism department at Pfizer, UK. 

From here I entered industry as an Analytical Chemist for GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage. My position in Chemical Development was to support the analytical requirements of pharmaceutical projects from early to late phase including scale up and pilot plant campaigns. 

Following my time at GSK, I moved into a more educational and problem-solving role as a Training and Technical Consultant for Crawford Scientific based across the UK. I developed a broad understanding of the challenges surrounding analysis in the pharmaceutical, fine chemicals, environmental and petrochemical industries whilst gaining vast experience in different vendors instrumentation, in particular Agilent and Waters. 

This led me to Waters UK where I worked for 2 years as an Applications Chemist. I continued to work on a wide variety of small molecule bioanalytical projects, and I developed methods for analysis of low-level impurities in drug substances. 

I was appointed as Associate Lecturer in the School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire in November 2009 where I taught Analytical Chemistry across a variety of disciplines ranging from Chemistry to Toxicology and Pharmacy. 

I returned to industry for one final year before starting my PhD. My role was Senior Applications Scientist and Training Coordinator at Thermo Fisher Scientific in Runcorn, UK. I developed LC-MS applications for pharmaceutical and biomedical industries and was project manager for all training requirements in the department and a primary trainer for a global product launch in India. 

In 2012, I commenced a BBSRC funded PhD in Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester working in the groups of Dr Nick Lockyer and Professor Roy Goodacre. My project entitled ‘Lipidomic and Metabolomic Analysis of Biological Response Mechanisms in Cancer Cells’ employed a multi-dimensional bioanalytical approach utilizing Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS), Raman Spectroscopy, Infrared Spectroscopy and LC-MS to study biological changes in cells as a response to drug treatment. My work primarily focused on understanding the metabolite and lipid changes of acute myeloid leukaemia cells when treated with a novel drug therapy. During this time, I was employed part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University as a student support officer and lead of second year analytical labs. 

Following my PhD I worked as a Cancer Research UK funded Post-Doc at the Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre in Manchester. My research aimed to identify and characterise pre-clinical and clinical tumours using mass spectrometry imaging modalities to provide biomolecular profiles for tumour regions in tissue sections. I primarily worked with DESI, REIMS (Waters UK) and MALDI (Kratos), to understand the response of cells and tissue to hypoxia and drug treatment. 

I took up the position as a Lecturer in Pharmacology at the University of Salford in December 2016. I then joined Seda Pharmaceutical Development Services as Principal Scientist in September 2020.