Margaret Faul: ‘Stand for what you think is right’
The pharmaceutical executive on why chemistry clicked for her, and life as a female organic chemist in the drug industry
I was born in Tralee, in County Kerry, Ireland and was there for about the first year of my life. But we landed fairly early in my youth in Dublin, so I spent most of my time growing up there, in a village called Dalkey that’s on the south side of Dublin and sits right on the Irish Sea.
There were a lot of physicians on both sides of my family. My one granddad was a very well-renowned doctor, and my other granddad was a pharmacist. Many of my aunts and uncles were either doctors or pharmacists, although a few were priests or nuns. I had a lot of role models in the medical field, so I always knew I would go into some element of that sector.
One of my favourite parts of my undergraduate studies was being in the lab at University College Dublin. I like working through logic sequences to be able to solve complex scientific problems, and it just kind of really clicked with me.