Women in Science Celebration: Interview with Dr. Itziar Irurzun Arana

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I was born in San Sebastian, a beautiful small city in the north of Spain, where I also studied Biomedical Engineering. After that, I moved to other cities around Spain to study a Master in Bioinformatics and finally I earned my PhD in Pharmacometrics in the University of Navarra. During my PhD I had the opportunity to do an intership in the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and that was my first time in the states. I really liked the experience so I moved to New York to do a postdoc in the Icanh School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. After a year, I decided that I wanted to change academia to industry and now I´m working in AstraZeneca in Cambridge (UK) as a Clinical Pharmacometrician, where I use mathematical modeling and statistics to describe and predict drug response in patients, allowing the optimization of clinical trial designs.


What advice would you give yourself if you were starting your career today? What would you say to encourage other women to persevere  in their career path?

Don´t be afraid of doing the wrong choice, making mistakes is part of the path, but correcting them is your responsibility. 

What would you say to encourage other women to persevere in their career path?

The best advice for women and men to persevere in their career path is to enjoy what they do and don´t seek other’s approval to do what they like and make them happy. I don´t think that women need a different advice than men, if that happens means that the career path for women and men is different and it shouldn´t be different.

Did you ever feel treated unfairly at work because of your gender and how did you deal with that?

No, I did not. However, if I ever experience such a thing, I know that I will not accept that situation. I will encourage women that are treated unfairly not to be silent because then they are normalizing a situation that is far from normal. People that behave in such a way should never have the comfort of our silence again.

What are your thoughts on the pressure that women face in having to make a choice between starting a family and progressing their career?

I think that in general it is difficult to start a family and progress in your career both at the same time. Sometimes you need to postpone one or the other. However, this is not a decision that women need to make, this is a decision that a couple needs to make. We need to make men understand that this is an all-gender question that they´ll need to ask themselves at some point in their lives, make them aware that probably they´ll need to sacrifice a bit their career for some time if they want to start a family, that raising children is not a women thing.

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'Don´t be afraid of doing the wrong choice, making mistakes is part of the path, but correcting them is your responsibility.'