A chat with Carol Robinson

Conversations with scientists

Proteins in a cell don't tend to practice social distancing. They have many associates but capturing all of the associates in one experiment is difficult. Dr. Carol Robinson and her team developed a way to be able to dissociate such complexes in a mass spectrometer and look at them in one experiment. It's a new kind of mass spectrometer and one she and her team co-developed with Thermo Fisher Scientific. Robinson is the first female professor of the University of Oxford, previously the first female professor of the University of Cambridge and she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. This is a story about her by Vivien Marx.