Spotlight on ECRs: Dr Lizzy Rosser

Interview by Claire Beesley, UCL Centre for Rheumatology

Lizzy is a senior research fellow who leads a team focused on studying B cell differentiation in childhood and adolescent rheumatic disease. Recently, Lizzy won the prestigious Lister Institute Research Prize for her innovative contributions to preventative medicine.

Thank you for joining us, Lizzy, and congratulations on recently being awarded the Lister Institute Research prize. That’s really amazing. To start, I wanted to ask how you first became interested in immunology?

I always wanted to be a scientist, but I don’t think I really knew that I wanted to do immunology until the first or second year of university. I applied to move from Biomedical Sciences to immunology and I graduated with a BSc in Immunology. I don’t really know if there was a particular moment, it’s just that’s what happened in the end and I’m glad that I did.

So you liked the immunology modules and in general wanted to be a scientist.

Yeah. And they all kind of came together!

And what does the Rosser lab look like at the moment and how long have you been a PI?

My fellowship started on the 1st of November 2022, so 18 months as a PI. But I would say that we didn’t fully staff the lab until October 2023 as it takes a long time to recruit. So even though the group started 18 months ago, every stage of that 18 months has felt very different. At the moment, we have two post docs.
Two PhDs, one full time RA and then an RA that I share half-time with the Institute of Child Health and then rotating BSc/Msc students of course.

And for anyone who’s not familiar with your work what is the overarching theme of the of the lab?

We look at how B cells contribute to pathology in autoimmune conditions of childhood. Specifically juvenile idiopathic arthritis, it’s associated uveitis, which is an inflammatory disorder of the eye, and in some projects systemic lupus erythematosus. But we are also a basic B cell immunology lab interested in understanding how environmental signals - such as those from the diet or gut-microbiota – influence B cell fate decisions.

On that note, can you tell us an interesting B cell fact that people might not know?

B cells don’t just produce antibodies, they can also produce IL-10 and suppress immune reactions and inflammatory disorders. So not just the bad guys!

And you were researching regulatory B cells or B cells that produce IL-10 as part of your PhD. Is that something you are still focusing on?

Now we’re a bit more interested in understanding the balance between pathogenic and regulatory B cells in different situations and how that contributes to inflammation. I actually started working on regulatory B cells during the project in the final year of my BSc with Professor Claudia Mauri, who ended up being my PhD supervisor. So that was pretty serendipitous.

What has your research career looked like so at UCL?

I’ve always been at UCL, in fact, right now we’re sitting about a 5-minute walk from where I had my first immunology lecture. And I’ve kind of just gone up the ladder bit by bit. So I did my BSc here. Then my PhD, then a fellowship, then another fellowship and a few post-docs, and now I’m my group leader here. Seems strange putting it in order like that.

Oh, it’s so exciting and great that you’ve seen that progression here and built so many contacts.

Definitely, that’s one of the nice things about not moving is you get to consolidate relationships and make new contacts over time.

And so how have you found the transition throughout your career? From PhD to postdoc and now to PI?

I found different stages harder than others, but thinking about it now, I can’t tell you which one was hardest. There is always something that you’re not expecting in the transition, and that’s the hardest thing. And often what happens is you get to the top, like when I finished my PhD I knew what I was doing in that environment/project. And then you start again and kind of feel like you’re very early in your career all over again. So yeah, going back to the bottom is always a bit challenging because you’ve become an expert in one thing and then you have to start all over again.

Is that like when you become like a junior postdoc, immediately after your PhD?

Yes. So you’re a senior PhD and then a junior post doc and then you’re a senior postdoc and then a junior PI which is sometimes hard to get your head around. I found the migration to PI not easier than I was expecting, but more fulfilling than I was expecting. I think because it was just after the pandemic and it was quite lonely for a while. So I really enjoyed starting the group and having a team that I see and communicate with a lot.

That’s really nice to hear. And so, since your PhD, how many grants and fellowships have you had?

I’ve had a Foundation Fellowship from Versus Arthritis, and then I had a ‘Lupus’ Mid-Career Fellowship from the Medical Research Foundation, and now I have my Senior Fellowship from the Kennedy for Rheumatology Research.

Amazing achievements! How have you found applying for these grants and positions?

At the beginning it was very overwhelming, and I think for your first fellowship, you need a lot of strong mentorship. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my sponsor Professor Lucy Wedderburn at UCL Great Ormond Street of Child Health she took hours of her time to discuss the proposal and to teach me how to write ‘grant speak’ or Claudia, my PhD supervisor, really believed in me and pushed me to ‘think big’. Now I quite like writing grants, although I know I’m privileged to have my longer-term fellowship, so I can kind of just enjoy the process and not worry about my salary and if I’ll be out the job. I’m sure I won’t feel like that in four years time when I’ve got to get another big grant and I’m worrying about other people’s salaries. But I like writing and enjoy the process. When you write a paper, you have to think about all the things that have gone wrong in the project and how to put it all together. But a grant is a sales pitch. You can say that you’ve got the best idea in the world and you want funding for it and nobody can say that you’re wrong (yet)!.

And so what advice would you want to give to someone who’s wanting to follow in your footsteps?

I think if you don’t want to move institutions, that’s OK you can create opportunities in your workplace. I think there’s a lot of pressure for people to move and I think it is good for some things, but not necessarily for others. I work with paediatric and adolescent blood/tissue samples that are also really available at UCL and I’m very, very glad that I stayed. And that your quality of life is as important as your scientific career. You’ll be a better scientist if you’re a happier person outside of the lab. You have to do what you like and do what you love. You know, you spend most of your time at work or working so don’t do something that makes you miserable.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about your role as head of the ECR divisional lead, which helps to promote healthy research culture and hosts events on a wide range of different topics. I wanted to know how you have found this role so far?

To be honest, the ECR network was so established and good at what it is doing. So my job is extremely easy. George and Angela and the rest of the network do such a fantastic job. I’m really glad I’ve done it and I think it’s helped me make better connections across UCL and specifically with the Royal Free Campus. I think my role as the lead is easier because I don’t really feel like the lead, there’s a team of us all working together so it feels like a community.

Do you have other roles like this now that you’re a PI?

I’m on the Kennedy Trust for Rheumatology Research Fellows Group Steering committee as the head of the communications subgroup.

And do you enjoy these sorts of roles?

Yes and no. Yes, because I like facilitating people and making connections and I think it’s really important. No, because sometimes when you’ve got a deadline coming up or something else and they have to go on the back burner so you can’t give them 100%. Like when I was preparing for the Lister Prize interview, George and Angela (heads of the ECRN network) have been working really hard to plan other events and I haven’t been able to support them as much as I would have liked.

Going back to the ECRN, I think having a healthy lab culture is so important and I wanted to know sort of how you try to promote that within your group.

Having a positive culture is very important to me. I try to have a positive attitude and I try to support people to be the people that they are. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses and I try to support people in their strengths. The other thing that we’ve done is at the beginning of lab meeting, everybody does this round up slide of their previous week. They just do one slide. Sometimes if they haven’t done much work because they were away, they show a picture of their holiday and I seem to just show pictures of my cats. I’ve found that really helps because then everybody kind of knows what’s going on in people’s lives and at the same time, everybody knows what everybody’s doing so we feel like a real team. It’s also a way to talk about failures as well as successes in the lab and I think that’s important. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we had a lab day out where I forced them to go to a medicinal plant garden and we had pizza in the middle of the day. But I try to make our team feel like a team and that makes my life easier as well, because then I also feel like I’m part of that team when I’m struggling. And because we’re part of the Centre for Adolescent Rheumatology, and other consortia we work with, our small team is part of much bigger teams so we have a big support network. I think ‘Team Science’ is very important and generally makes a better research culture.

Is that the Chelsea physic gardens that you went to?

It was at the Royal College of Physicians, which is just outside Regents Park. They have a medicinal plant garden out there and we went on a little tour. An amazing lady called Angela took us around the garden and told us how historical uses of plants in medicine and how all plants would basically kill us. It was great!

I really loved the Women’s Health symposium that you put together for the ECRN event this year. And I thought this was such a brilliant, engaging way to hear about historically understudied topic. I know you’ve worked in this field and I was wondering whether this is an area you feel passionately about and would like to continue studying the future.

When I finished my foundation fellowship, I applied for the senior research associate job at the Centre for Adolescent Rheumatology, where they were recruiting to contribute to this immune endocrinology workstream about how puberty affects the immune system. It was applying for that post that made me interested in it. I then wrote my Medical Research Foundation Fellowship on sex-biases in lupus. I think it’s something that we will carry on working on in the future, and we now consider sex in every experimental design. I’d love to write more grants on it in in the future, but at the moment I have to focus on the funding that we have, but there’s definitely new ideas and things that I hope that we do in collaboration with Professor Coziana Ciurtin and her team moving forward.

One of the amazing things I enjoy about being research is seeing all of the latest developments in the field, but I think sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming trying to keep on top of all the latest papers. I was wondering what your approach was to this and if you have any tips.

Twitter. That’s the easiest way because the freaky algorithm learns what is most relevant to you! So my stream is full of papers I should read. And then when you write grants, you have to read around that subject and really focus on an area. I also try not to go to too many conferences, but very particular conferences around an area that I want to keep on top of. But Twitter is definitely the best way to do it.  Also, one of our post docs Diana, she insisted that we have Journal Club in the lab, this has been really, really good. We do it about once a month and that’s when we really go through the paper and that also really helps – we generally find the paper on Twitter.

Do you try not to go to too many conferences so that you don’t get almost flooded with research?

Yes, or I try to go to really specialist conferences focused on one concept like ‘Germinal Centre Niches’ or ‘Sex differences in the Immune System’. The specialist conferences also tend to be smaller so networking is easier.

And so on the flip side, how do you maintain work life boundaries? Because I know that research can sometimes be all consuming.

One of the things I love about research is its flexibility, I think you have some weeks that are very, very busy and some weeks that just really aren’t as busy and I try to really take advantage of the weeks that aren’t as busy. I also have my allotment. Everybody knows about that. The group knows I’m obsessed with it, so I try to go to the allotment and it’s very hard to think about science when you’re concentrating completely on something else. But I think that we speak a lot about research being all consuming and how that’s difficult, but it is all consuming (for me) because it’s so interesting. I really love my job and I think that’s a real privilege. But you do have to take advantage of the periods where it’s not intense and I hate an early January grant deadline. That’s the only thing. I think the funding bodies should change the deadlines away from holidays.

And you’ve got cats as well?

Yes, too many.

We’ve covered some of this already, but what do you like to do in your free time?

Go to my allotment and follow my cats around the house. One of the reasons that I didn’t want to move out of London is that my family’s very close to me and my partner’s family is also in London. So we spend a lot of time together.

Have you always felt like it’s a privilege to work in in academia and science?

Well when my experiments didn’t work in the lab, that was very frustrating, but generally yes. The flexibility that research gives us, working to find out something new, and the light bulb moments are truly amazing. Also, that (nearly) everyday you get to tell someone your opinion on something, and they think it’s worth listening too. I think that is a real privilege.

What is a setback that you have encountered?

It’s a long time ago now, but I always come back to this one in the middle of my PhD, when all my experiment’s stopped working because we moved Animal House. Claudia kept on telling me it was an opportunity for months, but I was very negative because nothing was working! And my PhD upgrade Examiner, Lucy Wedderburn, also said the same thing. But in the end, that change of the animal house was the foundation of my PhD paper about B cells, the gut-microbiome and arthritis. And now my senior fellowship is on the same topic. So the set back was that things just really really didn’t work for a while, and we didn’t know why. And I mean, there was a time where I just didn’t know if it would ever work and what we were going to do. But just getting through it and understanding why is the basis of the whole of my career. So that is crazy.

I think you do need people who are there for you when things aren’t going right and who are able to see what you can’t see. What was the opportunity in the end?

The opportunity was understanding why. Why wasn’t it working anymore? And it’s because the animals were too clean, so they moved from a different kind of animal house to where everything was sterilised and filtered changing their gut-microbiome so they weren’t developing arthritis. I do think that there is always opportunity when something doesn’t work how you’re expecting, even though its very frustrating at the time.

Do you ever go in the lab now?

Very occasionally, but I have a lot of written work and paperwork and meetings which makes it difficult. So I think my team is much better in the lab now than me to be honest. Also things move so fast, so some of the things that they do now I never did in the lab. So I don’t think I’d even be that helpful. Spectral flow cytometry for one and I don’t how to code in R and they all do everything in R!

And to finish what is something that your most proud of in your career?

It would’ve been a different answer until quite recently, but now I’m very proud of my group, the people that I work with and the people that I recruited. And I think the Rosser Group’s quite a good thing. I worked really hard to get a senior fellowship to start my own group, and now it exists. And that’s pretty great!

Useful links

• Early Career Research Network
• Division of Medicine