After qualifying as a doctor and embarking on her training as a clinical oncologist, it would have been understandable if Sara Lightowlers had chosen to rest on her laurels for a bit. Instead, over the past seven years, she has completed both a PhD and two fellowships, been drafted back into frontline service as a doctor at Addenbrooke’s hospital during the pandemic, and had two children. Making life easier for herself doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.
In 2018, Sara was eight years out of medical school, which she had completed at Trinity Hall, and pursuing an academic clinical fellowship alongside her clinical oncology training.
“It’s a medical training programme which lets you have some time doing placements in academic groups,” she explains. “I wasn’t sure yet whether I wanted to do a PhD or not, and whether I would find an opportunity that suited me.”
During the fellowship, Sara was introduced to a clinical academic running trials on the efficacy of radiotherapy to treat breast cancer, with the aim of benefitting patients by making smaller surgeries possible.
“The project seemed ideal because it was partly clinical and working on a clinical trial, but there was a lab aspect as well. I wanted to do something that had a direct link to patient benefit, but was also exploring the science. So this just seemed like a really nice combination.”
The focus of her research initially was to assess whether radiotherapy administered to breast cancer patients prior to surgery can shrink the tumour sufficiently to allow a local excision, reducing the need for mastectomy. Currently, patients are sometimes offered chemotherapy ahead of surgery, which, depending on the subtype, can shrink the cancer significantly in some patients.
“We usually give radiotherapy postoperatively to patients with breast cancer, which means there’s very limited ability to do lab work to understand how it responds, because the tumour has been removed by the time the radiotherapy is given, so we don’t have anything to biopsy.”
However, as the trial proved slower to recruit than anticipated, Sara’s focus shifted in the absence of sufficient samples. Instead, she examined cases of recurrent breast cancer following treatment, to assess whether in some instances the second tumour was unrelated to the first, rather than a primary cancer proving resistant to treatment.
“That would have a lot of implications for how those cancers are treated, because they could be biologically quite different. It also has implications for the original treatment of the cancer if we know more about the patterns of how to prevent cancers coming back.”
Sara’s children, now aged six and four, were both born during her studies. The older had just turned one when the Covid pandemic not only derailed the possibility of lab work, but also summoned Sara back to clinical practice.
“I was seconded back to Addenbrooke’s during the first wave, so I paused work on the PhD, which I would have had to do anyway because no one was allowed in the lab. I restarted later that summer, but again it was quite difficult to do anything because the labs were still limited, and then it all started kicking off again, and then I was pregnant with my second. So I didn’t make very fast progress academically!”
She made up for lost time however, returning to clinical work in the summer of 2024, writing up her thesis in the evenings once the children were in bed, and finishing in January this year. Since then she has also completed the NHS Chief Sustainability Officer’s Fellowship, exploring healthcare sustainability and decarbonisation.
“It’s a bit of a wiggly career move, but I might be able to combine the two experiences going forward!”
College life is a different experience when you’re parenting two small children and remaining in the city where you already live and work. But Sara brought her children to several family events at Darwin, including the inaugural Family-friendly Formal two summers ago.
“I think they were four and two at the time – the kids were chaos but it was really nice. It’s such an amazing experience being in Cambridge and being able to take your young children to that sort of thing.”
Resetting her brain from academic mode back to that of practising doctor again is the current challenge, in a field where nothing stands still.
“Oncology is such a fast-moving speciality. At the moment I’m treating lung cancer and urological cancers, and lung cancer has changed massively since I last worked in that specialism almost 10 years ago. But I can feel myself getting back into the swing of things now.”
Sara will graduate on Saturday with a PhD in Oncology.
