Danuta was born and educated in in the UK and started her career on the typical path as an academic with a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from University College London, a Ph.D. from the University of Surrey and then two post-docs at Imperial College and the Institute of Cancer Research. However, she wanted to work on something that had a tangible end-point and so she moved to work in R&D in the pharmaceutical industry. She was fortunate enough to work on two drugs that reached the market and she also holds a number of world-wide granted patents that have led to clinical trials for a complement modulating biological.
Research in the pharmaceutical industry is very similar to academic research; the end-point is specific i.e. a new medicine but the process of getting to the endpoint is very similar to academia. Namely you need to identify a research project, define a research plan and cost it, apply for funding which can be just as rigorous if not more so than a grant proposal and finally execute the plan. Team leaders manage post-docs, graduates, Ph.D, and undergraduate students. However, unlike academia, publishing is not a priority.
During 30 years of industrial research Danuta held a number of positions of increasing responsibility (post-doc, group leader and manager) culminating in department head for reagent generation and assay development both biochemical and cellular. For the last 7 years at GlaxoSmithKline, she was a senior director leading industry academic collaborations across Europe with researchers in Universities and Institutes such as CeMM Vienna, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Imperial. This has brought her a great depth of research management experience that is invaluable for her role as director of MCB.
Since 2020, Danuta has been dedicating a small portion of her time as a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence supporting academics who want to commercialise their science from the UK.