Adele Farrell
BSc (Hons) Applied Biology 1996
After graduating in 1996 Adele applied for a job at ImmunoGen International Ltd, a company that supplied anti- antigen antibody for kits.
Her degree from Sunderland had equipped her with the skills to get her first job. She said: “Courses were very practice based and this gave us spark to know we wanted to be hands on scientist.”
Adele had previously done a BTech HND in the same field and during this time had taken a year out sandwich at North Tees Hospital Microbiology laboratory.
“It was this placement that gave me my job goal and I thoroughly enjoyed working with bacteria,” she added.
In 1997 Adele left Immunogen International Ltd and joined the then Public Health Laboratory Service at the South Cleveland hospital Middlesbrough – known now as the James Cook University Foundation Trust Hospital. In May 1998 she became state registered as a Biomedical Scientist after undertaking a post-graduate diploma at the Northumbria University.
She explained: “This was a busy year for me as I got married in August and at same time I was state registered in the May we bought our first house, so I moved out of home and became a homeowner!
By 2003 I was pregnant with our first child and had a boy in April 2004. I went back part time and had another child in 2006, a baby girl.”
Adele still works at the James Cook Hospital as a Specialist Biomedical Scientist. Her main duties are processing and analysing clinical samples for pathological microorganisms that cause disease in humans and providing accurate reports to clinicians.