Welcome to Leadership Journeys. I'm Leona Deakin and we are delving into the minds of successful women
to find out how they've achieved the amazing things that they've achieved.
Last week we heard from the inspirational Yana Smaglo. How do you turn a negative life experience,
something as horrific as escaping war in the Ukraine, into a positive?
A chance to do something good for the world. In this episode...
These people are telling us they wouldn't be there if it wasn't for our research.
They wouldn't be there if they hadn't had that scan. They wouldn't be there if they hadn't
taken part in that trial. And I can't tell you how powerful that is. That is the thing that makes you
get out of bed in the morning. What do you do if you know you're right but the world isn't listening?
Today's guest managed to make even the government hear her. But the person she really wants to listen to her message is you.
My guest today on Leadership Journeys is Dr Catherine Scott who has moved from being scientist
to CEO of Yorkshire Cancer Research. Many of the women who are speaking to me on the podcast are
women I've worked with but Catherine's a little different because I actually went to school with
you Catherine, didn't I? Hello. Yes you did and we won't be telling any of those stories on this podcast.
Gotcha. When we met at Sixth Form I was the girl who was desperately trying to get into the
school show and you were the straight-A academic looking for a brilliant career.
Weird how things turn out, isn't it? It's weird, yeah. Always jealous of the people who could get up on the stage.
You're too kind. So we are sitting today in Yorkshire Cancer Research's new wellness centre
which has a beautiful cafe and a nice lovely charity shop where people can come and get some
beautiful clothes and things. But most importantly it has this wonderful kind of exercise area and
rehabilitation area. Just tell me a little bit about this because this has been a bit of a passion
project of yours, hasn't it? Well absolutely. So we identified quite a few years ago there were
bits missing for people who've had a diagnosis of cancer including support after a diagnosis but
after treatment as well. A lot of people said that they felt like they fell off a cliff after
treatment ended. All that regular attendance at hospital and consultant appointments and la la la.
They had nothing to go to after that. But more, more, more importantly and I can't stress this enough,
exercise after diagnosis of cancer can half the chance of a cancer coming back and people were not
being told this information and we really wanted to bring that to people. So we're a Yorkshire based
charity so we thought we'll bring it to Yorkshire first but bang a drum really hard when we gather
that evidence so that people will have that available to them the country if not the world
over. Wow. I mean I have always been a bit of an admirer of Katherine because she's got the brain,
the size of a planet. But I'm very proud of you for this particular work that you've done and I'm
sure your journey towards this wonderful building and this wonderful mission will kind of come out
in your story. But let's just go back. So we studied our A levels together and then you went
off to university in Manchester. You did a degree and then you did a PhD in cell and molecular biology.
Correct. Thank you. And then so just thinking about that younger version of Katherine, so that kind of
at university early stages of your career, what were you wanting to do career wise? Did you have
a plan at that stage for what you wanted to do? I'm not sure I had a plan but I had a passion.
I absolutely loved, loved, loved biology. And by the way, my children have gone out of their way to
not do biology and perhaps there's a link here. I loved biology. It lit me up. I completely
understood it. It made complete sense. Nature is lazy. It always wants to do things the easiest way
possible. But there was a moment when I was about 18 years old when I discovered DNA. And I absolutely
cannot believe how amazing DNA is. It's the same stuff that makes mushrooms and wheat and humans.
And they're so, so different. How can you possibly have some molecules that do that range of different
things? I loved it. And then when I discovered mutations in DNA that can cause human diseases,
I was on my path. That was me sorted. And so you immediately following your PhD stayed in academia,
is that right? And stayed in research. So for about 12 years, I did laboratory science, a range of
things. I worked on bladder cancer. I worked on hematological malignancies like myeloma
and myeloid leukemia, those kinds of things. And then eventually I needed more people in my life.
So I gave up the lab and the plates of cells and I switched over to Yorkshire Cancer Research.
So how different is the job that you're doing now to kind of where you started out?
Worlds apart. Because when I first started out, I was doing experiments. I was using a pipette every
minute of the day. I was doing experiments that showed whether this mutation was linked to that
disease or whether it wasn't a mutation at all. Whereas now we are a funder of science and research,
but we also have active services which are research led. And they're not really anything
to do with that molecular level. It's really at the other end of the spectrum of what the disease,
in this case, cancer is. How it affects people is where I am now, not how it affects cells,
which is where I began. Would you be surprised, your younger self, would you have been surprised
by the job that you're doing now and the level that you're working at now? I would have not
believed this at all. Where I grew up, so when I grew up in Bradford, I grew up in a council house
in a part of Bradford called Lilycroft. And I didn't know anybody who'd gone to university
on our estate where we lived. I hadn't heard of a PhD. And I didn't know anybody who was a chief
executive or had ever wanted to become one. It just wasn't in our language. So it is a completely
different world, totally different world. And quite a fascinating journey. It would be really
interesting to know, I think, for those people, those leaders, ladies and gents who are kind of
on their way towards their kind of goals and dreams and ambitions. It'd be kind of useful to know
what have been the two or three big step changes, would you say, in your career moving from that
kind of bench scientist to the CEO? So just give me like those big moves, maybe. Well, it's quite
frightening when you look back at that, because some of them are accidental. Okay. So opportunity
just arose at that time. But I would say I had in school, I had an amazing maths teacher called
Harry Outram, who was terrifying. You could hear a pin drop in his lessons. But he gave me the quiet
confidence with maths. Now, I was never that into maths, as in I could do it. But I used it as a
tool because I loved biology. Biology was where my heart lived. So having a fantastic background in
maths really helped that. And I credit Harry Outram with, and he's sadly not with us anymore.
But I credit him with giving me that confidence. The second inflection point, I think, was when I
was walking down a corridor as a third year undergraduate. And the senior guy in the department,
a guy called Professor Keith Gull, who was, oh gosh, he was terrifying and strode the corridors.
And people would cower in doorways away from him. And he walked past me in a corridor. And he just
said, I want you to do a PhD in my lab. And I have not a clue. I asked, he retired quite recently.
And I asked him, at his retirement day, why did you do that? And he's from the North East. And he
said in a very broad North East accent, you just had something about you. And I thought, wow,
that's incredible. How lucky, how absolutely lucky was that to happen? So that's how I ended up doing
a PhD. And then the third one, and the last one, is, I think, when my boss at York University,
a guy called Jim Allen, who's now a professor in Newcastle, he said to me, you need more people in
your life. And in fact, I'm not going to apply for any more grants for you because you need to be
with more people. You need to do something that's in science, but not at the bench. And I thought,
you, how rude, how dare you, how, how, I was so indignant. But he was 100% right. And I absolutely
am delighted that he spotted that and pushed me in that direction.
So you've got kind of three key mentors there that are actually almost signposting your next
step. So your, your maths teacher, Mr. Outram, he built your, built your confidence. But then
the two academics, they actually signposted you to what they thought you should be doing.
Which is a bit sad, really, isn't it? Because it's supposed to come from within, but, and maybe it
was there inside. And, and certainly, and I suppose the other, and this is a daft one, maybe, but I am
the accidental chief executive in that, our previous chief executive left. And in that sort
of scenario, they just looked for some, just looked for someone to fill the space initially,
which I did for six months and learned a heck of a lot. And then I thought, well, I will apply
for this. But I don't think, again, that was a, I was a victim of circumstance, not a victim,
wrong word, but it was a, a circumstantial change. It wasn't a change that I set my heart on.
This is quite interesting, isn't it? Because I think a lot of us believe that luck is this big
factor and like the world is kind of conspiring to help us or hinder us. However, in what you're
saying, these people were noticing something in you. So, you know, that the professor that
stopped you in the corridor said there was something about you. You don't know what that
thing is. You can't kind of articulate that. But he, he knew there was something about you,
something maybe about your passion or your work effort, or just your mindset about how you were
kind of approaching the things that you were doing. He was seeing something behavioral,
presumably, in you that was making him think, oh, I want that person on my team.
I think there's a lot to be said for that. And I do wonder if I call it only child syndrome. So,
I am an only child. And I don't like it when people say no, when I think it's unreasonable
to say no. And that has played out absolutely in some of the things we've done at Yorkshire Cancer
Research, when we've been told no, and I thought, we're doing it anyway. So, so there's a bit,
maybe belligerence, determinist, you know, those kinds of words or just stubbornness.
You're a mum, you have a couple of children. How did that kind of change maybe what you were
doing or how you viewed work? Did it have an impact in any way? Obviously, no regrets at all
about having children and they are delightful. Even as teenagers, they're still delightful.
They... You have to say that. Well, they will probably listen to this.
But it is true. And they, they definitely made our lives complete. They came along at a time,
really, where I needed to make that decision. Am I going to push on to try and be a professor
in an academic environment or am I going to do something different? And that was around the time
when the advice to me by my then boss was, you do need to do something that's more people focused.
So, I think you crash those together. And that's when the job at Yorkshire Cancer Research came
up and I thought I have never done a desk job before where I'm sat down a lot of the day,
because in a lab, you're stood up moving around, you know, you're on your feet all the time. And
I thought this is going to be a really big cultural change. But it did fit because it was three days
a week whilst I had one child who was three and one child who was 18 months. Now, having young
children and trying to do laboratory work is almost impossible because it's setting up
experiments. If you need to set up one at 4am and leave it running until 4pm and then start
doing the tests on it, it just doesn't work because you've got nursery drop off. And as great as Dan,
my other half is, it wasn't fair to make him be the sole carer for our children on the days that
I was working. So, having the children made me stop and think about what was important in life
and work-life balance. And I tell everybody this and I think they would repeat it back almost like
a little mantra, family first always. So, somebody in the team has got a thing that's pulling them
away from work. Because if you do that and give people that freedom to be like that, then they
will give back more anyway. They will come back, work more than they would have done, done more
things with more enthusiasm. So, it was really key for me to have that work-life balance. So,
whilst it did slow down a little bit, it moved me onto a parallel track, which was research funding
side in a charity. And that's when that journey really began. So, you suddenly saw what this
organisation could do and it was quite a small organisation. And then it's eight years later
that you become the CEO. What was going on in those eight years? What were the steps going on
there? How did you get to this point? So, once we started taking some steps, first of all,
you need funding. So, you've got to start to take some steps. So, we did some innovative funding
bids from trusts and foundations and all that have never been done before in the charity,
and not to that extent. And I could see that that was a possibility. So, I started to build a team,
build a team, build a bigger team, add bits on. So, we started to look at data analysis and then
start to almost develop policies in that we do develop them now. But in the early days,
they were quite rudimentary. And we started to really clearly see that Yorkshire did lag
behind most other parts of England in cancer outcomes. So, that again gives you opportunities
because you think, okay, what are others doing? What can we do? Let's look around the world.
And building that expertise in the team, once you start to get a name for yourself,
then the sort of funding gets a bit more easy flowing because you can tell a really great story
in your funding application. So, instead of us just being a funder of other research, we were
then applying for funding to bring it into the charity in the first place, and then really
upsizing what we did fund. So, understanding what the work that was going to be funded by the charity
was going to do for people. And that again started to really gather speed and start
trundling down the road almost on its own. And that has led to some amazing successes for us.
And was that something then that you spotted a bit of an opportunity or maybe a gap in what the
charity was doing? And was it you that started to pull those teams in and start to look at
different ways of working? So, yes, but I definitely, the chief executive at the time,
a guy called Charles Rowatt, he gave me the wings to do that. So, he gave me the freedom
and the confidence. So, okay, Catherine, if you think going and putting some scanners in lorries
is the right thing to do, you go and build it and then come back and tell me what it looks like.
So, build it in a theoretical sense, then come back and tell me what it looks like. So, okay,
if you think this is a good idea, prove it. And all that gauntlet throwing down just is perfect
for me because I love a challenge. And again, when central government didn't want to do some,
didn't want us to do some of the things that we were doing, because it would give them a headache
later on down the line if we proved them to be successful. That's even more gauntlet throwing down.
So, what do you, thinking about your current job as a chief executive officer, what do you enjoy
most about it? What's most rewarding about working at this level? What do you say?
I should have probably brought the packet issues in for this moment because there are
occasional times, and they've happened two or three times now, where we go and do a research
showcase. So, we take our research out and we make it lay friendly and we fill a room full of
people who either have taken part in our research, who might be donors or supporters or volunteers,
and we fill that room full of those people. And then we bring on some very eminent professors to
tell us about the work that they're doing funded by Yorkshire Cancer Research. And then every now
and again, at the end of one of those research showcases, the people who've taken part in the
research, they will stand up and say thank you and give the team a round of applause. And that is
the most emotional, amazing, these people are telling us they wouldn't be there if it wasn't
for our research. They wouldn't be there if they hadn't had that scan. They wouldn't be there if
they hadn't taken part in that trial. And I can't tell you how powerful that is. That is the thing
that makes you get out of bed in the morning. When you're looking a little emotional, just
kind of talking about that. So I can't help those, I get a tear in my eye every time and it starts to
catch in my throat because it is the best day of the job. Well, how are you feeling? Obviously,
they're feeling very grateful for the kind of help and support that they've been given.
How are you feeling and your team feeling when you're standing watching those people?
Well, my overriding feeling is that we need to offer this to more people and it absolutely
needs to be, you know, it's all very well filling that room full of a few hundred people,
but there are literally thousands of people every year in Yorkshire who get a diagnosis of cancer.
So I just think it reignites and reaffirms that you want to do it on as big a scale as humanly
possible because there are so many gains we can make, continue to make, and we absolutely owe that
to these people. These people are the people who raise money for the charity. They support the
charity. They talk positively about the charity. They're the people we are here for. That's who
we're constituted to be helping. So doing as much as we can, as many people to help as humanly
possible. And is it possible to give us a kind of example of maybe somebody who you've seen the
charity really help? I mean, you know, obviously keeping their confidences, but almost an illustration
of the difference that can be made on that kind of individual level maybe. So we have, of course,
we have in our Active Together program here in Harrogate and actually we also have one in Sheffield.
We're opening one in mid Yorkshire in collaboration with the Trust and one in Airdale in
collaboration with the Trust. So we're starting to reach a lot of people, but in this Harrogate one,
this is the place where, because it's my daily office, this is where I can see people and talk
to people every day who are taking part in our research. And it's not just our Active Together
program. We meet other people who are benefiting from our research as well who come and see us.
And the stories range from people who've been given access to a drug that saved their lives,
if they had a particularly rare form of an inherited cancer, and then this highly specific
molecular drug that the charity funded the research of in the early days, that drug has
saved their lives. And it was a really aggressive disease and they would not have been here had this
been 10 years ago. So we have people like that in our world and they'd like, you know, they'll come
and see us, tell us their stories. But we also have people taking part in Active Together who come in
literally on crutches who have to be helped to the door. And by the end of six weeks with us,
they were walking laps of the big studio, which is without crutches. And that makes such a difference
for them, because suddenly they can walk the dog, they can pick up a grandchild from school,
whatever it is that's important to them, they can suddenly do those things because we help them.
And that's just ace. That's amazing, isn't it? And so the Active Together program, that's the
exercise-based wellbeing work that you're doing here. It's about getting people to be as fit
as they possibly can, multiple reasons why. But the first part of that is to make sure that they
can tolerate the full course of their treatment as well as possible. Because if they can do that,
they're more likely to stay on that treatment and complete the full course if they're staying as
well as they can be. So first of all, that helps with adherence to the treatments. Secondly, it
helps people with their mindsets, their positive mindset. It gives them a peer support group.
I mean, I have said for years before we moved into this building, the people who feel really
comfortable, if they've had bowel surgery, say for example, and their body might not operate in the
way it used to, they might have a colostomy bag, they might fart sometimes when they're not supposed
to. But if you're in an exercise class with other people who are all doing that same thing,
there's a real camaraderie and a real support network. We have an amazing spill kit here.
If anything gets spilled, whatever it is, we can deal with it. It's amongst friends and it's all
fine. Yeah. So you're not alone. And we're going to make you more resilient to whatever it is that
you have to kind of deal with over the next course of months and years for some people.
What you're doing is you're taking charge of an element of your treatment. You're doing it for
yourself. You're empowered to do that little bit on your own. You can't really make too many
decisions about what level of chemo you're going to have or what chemo timing regime you're going
to be on, for example. But you can help yourself with some exercise. How much of a fight was it
for you personally to bring this into being? Doing new things is always tricky. And I've learned
some brilliant lessons. I've, oh my goodness, this last two, three years, that has been my steepest
learning curve, even through PhD days. Because the absolute lessons that I've learned is I have an
amazing team here at Yorkshire Cancer Research, amazing, amazing team, but I need to bring them
with me. So when I'm having the next wacky idea and they're all take the mickey out of me for this,
and that's fine. It really is fine because I'll have 99 ideas and one will work. And that's
actually their skills and their abilities, them take, identify the one and then take it.
But winning hearts and minds is such a huge, important part, winning people over,
giving them the confidence that it's going to work. And that if it doesn't, you've got their back.
And that is a big, big lesson that I've learned over the last two or three years. It isn't just
ploughing ahead and saying, well, we're going to do it because I want to do it. No, no, no,
that is the wrong approach, 100% wrong. You've got to bring your people with you.
And so how have you done that? How have you brought them with you? Like tactically,
tactically, what are the kind of activities that you've done more of or the ways you've behaved
differently maybe that have enabled you to get their hearts and minds? Building it together.
So going to them with a problem and then saying, how can you help me fix this or how can we fix
this together? So actually going to our different departments in the charity and saying, let's build
this together. But these are the worries I've got. And when obviously some of the worries that they've
got and they'll have other worries as well, navigating those together and building it together.
And just thinking of that, because I feel very proud of you when you talk about this as a kind
of long standing friend. What do you think young Catherine would have thought of what you've
achieved? Would she have been proud? I suppose young Catherine was a bit sort of shoulder
shruggy in some ways. She was a bit like, no, definitely not too cool. I was like, oh, you did
that. Okay. So quite kind of accepting really of the future. I think as a youngster though,
I didn't really challenge the future enough. So I would probably say to that young self,
don't give yourself false ceilings. Don't give yourself false limitations. It isn't a limitation
that you were born in a council house in Bradford to two brilliant parents who always supported me.
They were my super strength actually. So early years up until probably university years,
I relied very much on them with self-confidence, self-esteem, all of those great things that your
parents can do for you. I had that in spades from mine. It's about emotion again, isn't it?
And that the power of the family and that you went into life feeling confident inside, but still
interestingly having these perceptions of the world maybe that there were limits or there were
ceilings or there were things you couldn't do because dot dot dot. Absolutely. And you go to
university and everyone takes the Mickey because you're a Northern lass. And so you probably try
a little bit harder. You probably do revise that a little bit longer because you don't want to be
shown up. It doesn't come naturally. It really didn't. I often used to say I was the first
person in my family to go to uni, which is actually not true because my mother got there
the year before me. So she did start a degree the year before me. Brilliant. Well done, Mum.
But yes, so I think you've just got to be determined is the wrong word. I don't really
know. I'm not very good at expressing it because it's things that happen to you at a moment in time.
But they are some of them are secret strengths and you just need to tumble to that. You just need to
figure out actually that isn't a bad thing that you want to work a little bit harder, that you want
to prove yourself, that you're a little bit embarrassed maybe because you didn't go to a
fancy school. We went to a very nice school, by the way, but it wasn't a super performing
academic private school, say, for example. Yeah. So maybe it's not about having that kind of pre-designed
ideal route to wherever you're going, but actually embracing your differences. And even if those
differences might feel uncomfortable or might be a little embarrassing, you know, I moved schools
to meet you guys and had a very different accent and there was a lot of mickey taking. And I suppose
there's a choice there of whether you kind of try to change yourself to fit the world or you try and
change the world to fit you and different people do different things. I don't remember you ever
changing to fit the world, my love. I think you got the world to fit you. However, who knew that
there was a W in the middle of the word Stoke? All my fellow Stokeys know what we're talking about
there. There's definitely a silent W. And there was kind of one other thing that I was just going
to ask you there, just talking about your parents. So I think that whole thing about inner confidence,
you know, we can have this outer confidence where you're comfortable standing up in front of a group
of people and talking and that's like social confidence. That's one thing. But that inner
confidence, that self-esteem, that's kind of invisible to the world. And some people have
got it in spades and some people don't have much at all and really influences kind of how we
interact with the world and how we make our way through the world. So what do you think your mom
and dad did that was so powerful in giving you that kind of inner confidence? I suppose I grew
up in a house where, and I don't even know where did my parents get this background from because
it wasn't their background, but I grew up in a house where education was the freedom key.
So the key to a future life, living an interesting life, doing an interesting job,
meeting interesting people and achieving things, it comes from having an education.
So whilst I was never locked in my room, I didn't need to be locked in my room. I enjoyed revising,
sorry, but it's true. But I got a lot of benefit from having parents that really,
really believed in education. And my dad's philosophy certainly was, because my dad had
some hard jobs. He had some digging up the roads in the middle of the night kind of jobs
and gas leaks and so on and so forth. Probably saw some horrible things that he'll probably never
tell us about when houses exploded, etc. His attitude was always, if you want to work in
retail at the end of your degree or PhD, you can do that. But you can't go and work in a lab
if you go into retail at 16, because I worked in Boots the Chemist actually when I was a 16 year
old and I loved it. I really loved it. You can go, you know, it's a one way valve. If you have
education, you can then do anything. Whereas if you don't have education, your options are limited.
And so they believe in education, but it sounds like they believed in you. They believed in your
ability to be educated and have a better life for yourself. But they never would never have never
made it about me. It was always about the education. So it was like secret esteem giving,
maybe it didn't, I'd never felt big headed. I, you know, hand wringing about, you know, yes,
yes, all right, I did get these A's and whatever, and that degree and so on and so forth. But I've
never been a straight A student and I, you know, I got a 2.1 in my degree, I didn't get a first.
But they never, neither did they ever say, my parents never said, what went wrong? Why didn't
you get a first for all our money? They never did that. But neither did they feel like they had to
say, oh, you should be revising more. I was left to find my own way in education in terms of all
the support, that hidden support and sort of confidence that they gave me to do that and the
reasons why I should do that, but never with a carrot or a stick. So they gave you a strong
reason why you should educate yourself, but they didn't tell you how to educate yourself. They
didn't tell me how, they left that up to me. I think that's quite a nice kind of metaphor for
leadership though, isn't it? I think giving people a reason to work towards something and a reason
to achieve something, but letting them decide exactly how they do it is often one of the most
powerful leadership strategies, I think. So well done, mum and dad. Turns out our parents can be
surprising when we look back. Our teenage selves would not have seen that. And my own teenage
children, I think they obviously they've grown up in a different world, but we've tried very hard
not to force them to revise. If anything, it's a bit more like Matilda in our house where we say,
are you still revising? Don't you need to go to the pub? Is there something that you would like to
share kind of out there in the world, through this podcast, something that you've learned
through your career or your kind of leadership experiences that you would want to kind of put
out there? We had a lot of resistance about putting the scanners in the lorries and driving
them around more deprived parts of the county. And we did it and we proved that it worked. And
now the government have rolled it out as a national screening program. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
The next two that are coming down the pipeline are genetic testing, because if you can identify
people who are at risk, you can give them more support, as in more screening or more early
warning symptoms, more lifestyle advice to make the cancer is a disease of thresholds. And it
takes multiple things for you to tip over a threshold and for a cancer to form. So early
warning is absolutely key. So bringing that into our more standard care in the UK would be brilliant.
And then exercise after diagnosis of cancer. So many studies have shown how worthwhile that is.
And it's not, people don't see it as some people don't see it as academic research, but it's just
the same way of priming your immune system as the modern molecular drugs do. It's just an additional
way. You don't do it instead of you do it as well as because your own body, the human body is super
capable of dealing with aberrant cells, mutated cells. And it does it on a day to day basis.
It's just every now and again, one escapes and becomes a tumor. If you can prime your immune
system by doing exercise, either pre any cancers or once you've had a cancer diagnosis doing it
afterwards, you really significantly improve your chances of surviving that cancer and being
healthier on the other side as well. This isn't a replacement therapy. That would be bonkers. Why
would we go against all that research led stuff that has led through clinical trials to the
treatments that we have the very effective treatments that we have for cancer today.
But there are the new class of drugs that are coming along down the track, we're already in
clinical use now. And the immuno oncology space are about priming your immune system to get your
own immune system to tackle your cancer and exercise after diagnosis does that. So do that.
And it is empowering and people can do it for themselves. But you've got to have people to
believe that it works. And that that is really key because that will keep people doing it.
Cancer patients will tell you that one of the three things they worry about the most is the
cancer coming back. The second is their family and the third is pain. If you look at cancer studies,
the world over. But if we can help people reduce that risk of a cancer coming back, then I will
pour our heart and soul into doing that. And that is really having a massive impact on the
world, isn't it? So I think you are very impressively achieving your goals, which is wonderful.
You know, I thought I thought you were going to spend your life in a lab, actually. So I feel
very proud of you and very grateful that you've shared your story here with us today. It's been
fascinating. And I hope that people can hear within it some of those factors that have helped you
along the way and that you didn't start out necessarily as this budding CEO at 20 who was
always going to lead an organization. Actually, this has been an evolving journey of experiences
that have brought you here and made you the person you are today and giving you the leadership style
that you have, which is obviously working incredibly well for you at the moment. So that's
brilliant. As a final kind of question, can I ask who else would you recommend comes along and speaks
to us on leadership journeys? Are there other female leaders that you think, oh, you should
speak to her because you find them impressive? The lady I would recommend to speak to is Dame
Callie Palmer. She's the NHS England cancer director. She's also the chief executive of the
Royal Marsden. And she is awesome. She was here actually about a week ago in the building. And
she's she has the brain of size of two planets, NATO universe. But she's also really human in her
approach. She's very people focused. She's got emotional intelligence coming out of her paws.
And yet she does this very serious, very big job. And I am definitely I was like fan girl when she
was in the building. I am in awe of that woman. And I really enjoyed spending a few hours with her.
That's brilliant. Thank you, Callie. We're coming your way. Thank you, Dr. Catherine Scott. This
has been lovely. Great. Actually, I've learned more about you. This is nice. It's been really
it's been really lovely having you along. Thank you. Coming up next time, there's always another
way. That would be my advice to anyone really. And you know, as one door closes, I know it's
cliche, but another one can open as long as you're looking for that door and don't allow
anybody to tell you you cannot do it.