Profile
Greg Melia
Well hello careers zone!
My CV
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Education:
St Marie’s Primary School Sheffield 1990-1996, Birkdale School Sheffield 1996-2003, University of York (undergrad) 2003-2008, University of York (PhD) 2009-2013
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Qualifications:
PhD Bioelectromagnetics, MEng Electronic Engineering, A levels, GCSEs, Grade 5 Guitar and a First Aid certificate
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Work History:
NHS Newcastle Medical Physics department 2013-2015, St Cuthbert’s Church Cheadle, Youth worker 2008-2009
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Current Job:
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Medical Microwave Imaging
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About Me:
Early thirties, brown hair, green eyes … wait, what sort of site is this?!
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Hi!  I’m Greg, I live in York and I’m a medical imaging researcher.  Before I came here I worked for the NHS in Newcastle, and I’ve also been a youth worker in Manchester.  I like all the normal things: films, music etc, and I can never get out of bed on Saturday mornings.
My main hobby is cycling: I used to be a mountain biker when I lived near any mountains, now I love going on relaxed cafe rides with friends, or going on tour and getting lost in the middle of countries you’ve never heard of, carrying nothing more than I can fit in my saddlebag. This year I went touring around Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. I bet you can’t spell all those!
Back at home, I do like a good pub quiz – and sometimes we even win them.  It’s a bit geeky I know – being able to quote all the states of America is rather sad, but you do learn some interesting stuff.  I guess that’s why like being a scientist, and also why I like travel: there are so many fascinating things out there in the world, and I learn something new every day.
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My work is about designing new, safe, low-cost ways to detect cancer, so we can put scanners in more places, scan people more regularly and find it – and stop it – earlier. The problems with the ways we have of imaging cancer at the moment are that they’re either really expensive (like Magnetic Resonance Imaging) or else they use high energy particles (like CT scans or PET scans), which need to be closely controlled so they don’t cause a danger to people around the scanner. I’m trying to detect cancer using the thermal radiation emitted by your body, so it’s completely safe and can be used anywhere. In the future, I hope that systems like this could be in every GP surgery, so you can scan people quite often, and catch the cancers before they become a problem.
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My Typical Day:
I might do some experiments but I’ll probably be designing or programming new pieces of equipment. Oh, and drinking coffee.
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Come in, have a coffee, turn on the apparatus to warm up, have another coffee, decide I’m definitely not a morning person … answer emails, try to put off doing whatever I’m meant to be doing, wish I could wake up; did I tell you I wasn’t a morning person?
I’ve got several mini-projects on the go at any one time. I’ve recently been spending a lot of time designing circuit boards for the imaging system we’re building, but now the design is finished I’m doing a lot of liaising with manufacturers, agreeing prices and timescales to get my designs built.
I’ve just built some sensors to be used with hospital patients, I finished them on Friday and today one of my colleagues is taking them to a real hospital, to see what the nurses think about them. It’s all very well designing equipment that works scientifically, but we need to make sure it’s acceptable to doctors, nurses and patients, or else they won’t use it.
Today I’m also working on my application for chartered engineer status. Like a chartered accountant or architect, this is a professional qualification that shows you are at the front of your field and are continuing to develop yourself as you work. I did an accredited degree so I don’t have to do any exams for this, but I do have to do a big scary interview where they check how I’ve been keeping myself up to date since I graduated, with technical knowledge, professional development, management skills and things like that.
My project is joint between the university and a company called Sylatech, so I might be at either site I’m at the company today but I need to pop down to the university later to encourage some orders through the finance department -because being a scientist isn’t all about sitting in a lab, you’ve got to do all the normal office environment type stuff too. There are the same sort of hundred milllion semi-unimportant tasks that crop up in any job: filling in spreadsheets of expenses, doing risk assessments, all that kind of stuff.  Sorry guys but you can’t escape those whatever job you do!
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Friendly, sporty, enquiring
What did you want to be after you left school?
I wanted to design complicated electronics to do interesting things, i.e. exactly what I’m doing now!
What don't you like about your current job?
Trying to get products designed and built on time can put you under a lot of pressure. I’ve been putting in some long hours recently!
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