Taking Up Space: Becoming a PI, Mother & Advocate in Academia ft. Dr. Simone Webb
Dr. Simone Webb is a Royal Society Career Development Fellow at Newcastle University to transition to become a PI, where she investigates one of biology's most intriguing frontiers: how the nervous system regulates the formation of blood and immune cells. With a PhD from Newcastle, an MSci from UCL, and multiple publications in the world's most prestigious scientific journals, she's built deep expertise across bioinformatics, single-cell analysis, and developmental biology. But Simone didn't set out to become any of this. She stumbled into bioinformatics through a plant biology project and followed the thread all the way to a landmark Nature paper on human hematopoiesis, and now to her own lab. Born and raised in London as a first-generation Jamaican migrant, her path has carried her from UCL to Australia, Switzerland, and beyond. It was during her postdoc that she embraced a new chapter: motherhood. And with nearly a decade in the charity sector behind her, she remains fiercely committed to equity in education and scientific outreach. Simone gets honest about all of it: the mentor who told her to stop disqualifying herself before anyone else could, what it takes to build a scientific career and a family at the same time, and why gratitude, left unchecked, can quietly become a trap. It's a masterclass in resilience, in redefining what "qualified" really means, and in building the life you actually want instead of the one you think you're supposed to settle for. In this episode: How Simone broke into bioinformatics without a bioinformatics degree and why her "biology-first" route is far more common than people think The mentor advice that became her career mantra: "let them say no" Leading a landmark human hematopoiesis atlas in the middle of a pandemic Her postdoc pivot to building a whole-organism developmental cell atlas Landing a Royal Society Career Development Fellowship supporting Black heritage researchers Growing up with almost no Black women role models in senior academic science — and co-founding the African & Caribbean Researchers Collective in response Becoming a mother, and why "there's never a good time" to start a family in academia How gratitude can quietly become a trap, and learning to own her accomplishments instead of chalking them up to luck Who Simone is beyond the lab: London, the sea, hot yoga, sci-fi novels, and live music CONNECT WITH US: 📧 Business Inquiries: ambitiouslyherpodcast@gmail.com 📱 Instagram, TikTok & YouTube: @ambitiouslyher.podcast 🎵 Official Theme Song: "Ambitiously Her Podcast Theme" across all streaming platforms CREDITS:Host, Founder, Podcast & Social Media Creative Director, and Theme Song Writer: Dr. Mariana Quiroga Londoño (@marianaql.science) Podcast Editing and Social Media Content Creation: Bhumika Manjappa (@coffee_and_cognition) and Dr. Mariana Quiroga Londoño