What's it like being a woman in science? With Professor Chris Halsey

Can you introduce yourself and say a little bit about what you do?

I'm Chris Halsey and I am a consultant paediatric haematologist. I work at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow looking after children with leukaemia, but I also am a clinical academic. I spend about a quarter of my time working as an NHS consultant, and the rest as a researcher.

I run a leukaemia research group at the University of Glasgow and have recently become Head of the School of Cancer Sciences. That's a lot of my workload now and is a really exciting opportunity for me. I've always worked in childhood leukaemia, but the new role means that I'm responsible for the whole cancer strategy across all ages and cancer types. I’m learning a lot.

For research, I work on central nervous system directed therapy for childhood leukaemia. Currently, to cure childhood leukaemia, we give all children a lot of chemotherapy that's directed at the brain and central nervous system.

This involves injecting chemotherapy directly into the spinal fluid, which cures many children and prevents leukaemia coming back in the fluid around the brain. But it’s an unpleasant treatment, that has serious side effects.

I’ve been reading up on your projects with CCLG and I read that children with leukaemia need to have up to 26 chemotherapy injections into their spine - that sounds very difficult to go through.

Definitely. At the moment you can't easily see leukaemia cells in the fluid around the brain, which is why we give all children such strong treatment. Only in a few children can we see some leukaemia cells, but we know this is just the tip of the iceberg – there are a lot more we are not seeing.

We've been really successful in childhood leukaemia in developing ways to measure the tiny, sub-microscopic amounts of leukaemia in the blood or bone marrow. This has really transformed our ability to treat leukaemia, because we can track how well the patient is responding to treatment and, in the ones who are responding really well, we can actually cut back on their treatment.

In the spinal fluid, we don't have anything like that so it’s almost like we’re treating everyone with a blindfold on. Our new study, called CSF-FLOW, is looking a samples of patient’s spinal fluid. We're hoping to really develop a way of finding sub-microscopic amounts of leukaemia in the spinal fluid so we can work on more personalised treatments.

Do you love your job and why?

I absolutely love my job! I think I'm incredibly lucky because I can combine intellectual curiosity with the real rewards of looking after patients and their families. They both bring very different things to the table, and being able to combine the two is amazing.

I also love doing work with international clinical trials and being part of an international community of researchers, who are all working on the same goal of improving outcomes for children with leukaemia. It's really special to be involved in working across the whole world. Although, finding a time zone for your teleconference when you've got researchers from Australia, Los Angeles and Taiwan is difficult!

When did you decide to be a researcher?

When I was really little! My dad did medical research - although he was a chemist, not a doctor. He worked for the Medical Research Council and so I always wanted to be a researcher like him.

In honour of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, I’d love to hear about your experiences as a female researcher. Was it harder as a woman to go into science and did you have to overcome any hurdles?

I never personally experienced any negativity about me going into science. I was always encouraged by teachers and, when I was at university, I was always encouraged to pursue science.

I think the main thing many women find is that there is a lack of role models in positions above them. This is true for lots of people with other protected characteristics, such as people with disabilities, or of different ethnicities.

I think this held me back a little at the beginning, not in terms of going into science, but by affecting my aspirations for what I could achieve within science.

Do you think this has changed since you started your career?

Yes - enormously actually! In my School over the last five to 10 years, we went from having two female professors to having 11. It’s been really helped by an initiative called AthenaSWAN. It tries to improve the representation, initially of just women, in science and STEM subjects and has more recently expanded towards all protected characteristics.

Universities are now encouraged to have an AthenaSWAN award to show they are committed to diversity, and it can impact on what funding they are eligible for. It really has made everyone sit up and act.

One of the questions it asks is: why are there so few senior female academics? In life sciences, for example, about 60% of undergraduate and PhD students are female. Even at post-doctorate level, over 50% are female. But when you look at professors, maybe less than 5% are female.

Departments are really having to look at that in detail, why women aren’t staying in science - what are the barriers and what could help support career prospects for women in STEM subjects?

It's interesting that there's less of a problem getting female students, as opposed to keeping them.

Yeah, absolutely. If you look at metrics of success, like the numbers of students who get firsts or distinctions, women are overrepresented - so it's not that they can't do the science.

Part of it's historical, but we need to re-evaluate how we judge success, and what the criteria for promotion are.

The criteria have often been based on specific measures that don't necessarily favour some of the characteristics of women in general. Some things they bring to the role can be undervalued at the expense of things that may be more traditionally male behaviours.

You finished a project funded by CCLG Special Named Funds in 2023, titled ‘Improving the outlook for children with Philadelphia positive acute lymphoblastic leukaemia’. What were you doing and what impact do you hope it will have?

This is an exciting project! We’re working with colleagues who work on chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), which is a rare disease in children and more common in adults. Another type of leukaemia, normally found in children, is called Philadelphia positive acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (Philadelphia positive ALL) and we normally treat that as a completely separate disease.

But the fascinating thing is that they're caused by the same genetic change, when the chromosomes break and re-join incorrectly to form a new chromosome. This broken chromosome, called a Philadelphia chromosome, seems to cause two very different diseases.

One of the reasons we think this happens is the type of cell in the bone marrow where the chromosomes break and re-join might be different between each disease.

Then we discovered that some children with Philadelphia positive ALL didn’t do as well as other children, and we didn't understand why. When we looked at it, we found that the cancer was behaving much more like CML than Philadelphia positive ALL - even though the patients seemed to have ALL under the microscope.

What we've done in this project is to try and find out exactly where the chromosome broke and what cells it happened in. We think that we could use that information to show what type of leukaemia a patient has so we can give them the right treatment, because CML needs different treatments to Philadelphia positive ALL.

So, what is your biggest or proudest achievement and how did it feel?

It’s quite hard to pick one! I would say being awarded a Cancer Research UK Programme Foundation Award, which is six years funding and worth around £1.5 million. A grant that big can fund a large piece of research and is very competitive, but I got it by myself.

As a clinical academic looking after children, I wear a medical and a science hat, which makes it hard to feel that you are a really good scientist. You know that you're a good doctor, but proving yourself amongst other people who are scientists full-time is quite challenging.

So, when I got the Cancer Research UK Award, it showed me I really can do science and that people believed in me.

It’s always hard to decide what your biggest achievement is, especially when you have so many!

That’s true - I probably should have said completing my PhD whilst having three young children.  This was really difficult!

A lot of people think that women just aren't as interested in STEM or that they have different priorities, like family. What do you think? Is there a reason there aren't as many women in science, or do we just need more support and more role models?

It's not true that women aren't as interested, and the stats I mentioned earlier about 60% of students in life sciences being female really speak for themselves.

There are some structural things about how we measure success that need to change, and we've constructed those on quite old-fashioned values that favour individual success and competition between research groups.

Now, the whole research field has realised that science is a collaborative endeavour. Teamwork in science traditionally hasn't been rewarded in academic research, but I think as we're moving towards models where contribution to team science projects is better valued, then women will be seen to contribute just as much as men.

Definitely!  Are there any changes needed in academic research to be more supportive to other underrepresented groups?

We're actually doing reasonably well at solving the problem for women. It’s much harder if you look at other things like ethnicity or disability. It’s particularly difficult when a person has multiple protected characteristics. For example, if you are black, female or disabled and LGBTQ+, that's so much harder, so I think we've got a lot more work to do.

As a senior academic, how do you support underrepresented communities in your field?

Mostly by raising awareness and reflecting on real data. For example, we record the race, ethnicity and gender of our seminar speakers. At the end of the year, we can look back and say, did we have roughly 50% women? Did we have representation of different ethnicities?

It's not about quashing freedom of speech - it's showing people the advantage of having diverse groups. Diversity promotes original thinking - if you just get 10 people in the room who look exactly like you, you're unlikely to come up with creative and new ideas. We need to show people that supporting diversity is not only good for people in underrepresented groups but is hugely beneficial to everyone within the field.

We tend to focus a lot on the science and the researchers, but do you think other staff, like admin and support staff, don't get enough attention?

Definitely. I completely feel that they don't. We put far too much emphasis on being the first name or the last name on a paper. It’s important to show the contribution of the people who do all the important stuff behind the scenes that allows you to develop these exciting scientific findings.

What advice would you give to women or other underrepresented communities who are considering a career in science?

Go for it! It's a really varied, interesting career. You can follow your passions and interests - it's so rewarding. However, you do need to be resilient. You need to believe in yourself. There’s a lot of rejection in research - you put in grants which get rejected, you put in papers which get rejected. You need to learn to deal with that whilst not letting it affect you personally.

Having belief in yourself is really important and that can be helped by surrounding yourself with the right people and role models.