After years of neuroscience research and medicine regulation policy, I founded the multi-award-winning Fruit Fly Collective, a not-for-profit organisation that focuses on supporting families when a parent has been diagnosed with cancer.

I'm interested in finding new ways to support parents, so they feel less isolated, gain more confidence in supporting and communicating with their children and have better mental wellbeing. I want to understand how support can be implemented within the cancer care system that currently contains multiple barriers to adoption due to numerous factors, such as limited workforce and skillset.

My dad died of cancer when I was 12. The impact of him dying of a disease I did not understand and not being involved in family decisions has left a big emotional scar, but one that has driven me to help families in the way I would have liked to have been helped. The overseas learning I am going to undertake is from charities who create parent-centred co-ordinated approaches to support parents from the point of diagnosis and beyond.