Question: What inspired you to do what you do today? Did you choose to do microbiology because of what's happening in today's world?

Rosie Watts answered on 30 Sep 2025:

Thank you for the question. 🙂

I’ve always wanted to help people and particularly protect and improve people’s health (it’s the most important thing!).
Being a doctor/nurse wasn’t really for me, and the lab environment really appealed to me. I liked doing things like looking at ‘pretty’ images down a microscope, and doing experiments to find out what would happen (e.g. what happens when I apply certain chemicals to different bacteria). So then I always thought I would work in a local hospital lab, but after university, I fell into the vaccine research environment – it was the first job I could get!

Then there was an Ebola outbreak in 2014 in West Africa. It was massive and devastating, killing thousands of people. There was a call for volunteers to go and help the fight against the virus, which I did – we all even got a medal from the queen! Ever since then, I have been inspired to work against the worst pathogens that can sweep through populations and kill.

& you’re right, the events that have been happening (and unfortunately, keep happening) in today’s world continue to motivate me to keep going. There is also a lot of health inequality globally, so I feel very strongly about trying to improve everybody’s access to healthcare. 🙂