Targeting cancerous cells

Professor Rebecca Shipley leads a team developing tools to understand the structure of cancerous tissues.

I'm Professor Rebecca Shipley and I'm Director of the UCL Institute for Healthcare Engineering. I'm on a mission to find better ways of treating cancer.

I became really inspired to start working in engineering because I wanted to work on innovations that can make a difference to people's lives. One of the really exciting projects that we're working on at the moment is around understanding how drugs are delivered to cancers.

We're combining some really exciting and cutting edge technologies. So we're using 3D microscopy to reconstruct the blood vessel networks in whole tumours on a computer and through physical models. We then use computational modelling to simulate how drugs are delivered through those networks so that we can inform the best treatment strategies for individual tumours.

There are so many aspects of my job that are really exciting to me. So first of all I get to apply really cool maths that I still really enjoy. Secondly, I get to work with a range of different people from different backgrounds, so that could be physicists, mathematicians, biologists and also clinical scientists.

And then finally I get to work on problems that have real impact and are important for the health of people, and that's really motivating.