Meet Melbec: Dawn Mellors
We will be highlighting a member of the Melbec Team every so often in a ‘Meet Melbec’ blog post. For our first one, we felt it was only right to start with our Founder and Technical Director, Dawn Mellors! Read on to find out more about Dawn.
What prompted you to set up Melbec Microbiology?
The job that I had at the time was changing to more regulatory but I wanted to stay focused around microbiology testing. I also knew that we could offer a better service than many labs using the industry knowledge and microbiology skills that we had so it seemed an obvious choice to set up Melbec.
What is your daily focus/role at Melbec Microbiology?
My role is very client focused and I spend time out visiting clients. When I am in the office I spend time writing methodologies and validation procedures for bespoke methods and I am still often to be found in the labs.
What has been your favourite/most exciting project to work on throughout your career?
This is very hard to answer. Every time I speak to a client I learn something new. All the testing we do is important to the client so there hasn’t been one project which has been more important than others. As a microbiologist I like it when we isolate a bacteria from a sample which demonstrates all the textbook characteristics for that organism so things like pigment, odour what the colonies look like etc. This is actually quite rare in wild strains so nerdy microbiologists get quite excited about this.
What has been your proudest moment at Melbec Microbiology so far?
There have been many proud moments. We send out customer feedback questionnaires every year and reading the comments that our customers write makes me feel proud. Customer service is exceptionally important to me and many of the comments we get mention how much they appreciate our hard work and support. This always makes me proud.
What also makes me proud is watching the development of some of the team members. We always try to promote internally when we can and many of our team members have progressed though the business and have developed both professionally and personally. This makes me proud.
What do you love most about working at Melbec Microbiology?
I get to do, everyday, things I like. I work with a great team, we have lovely clients and I still get to work in the labs and be very involved on the technical side. I am very lucky.
What are you most looking forward to?
We are currently running a number of projects to reduce our environmental impact. This is very important to me and the team is working hard to reduce our use of single use plastics and recycle most of our glassware. This is a big task as the majority of consumables used in microbiology labs are single use. We already have the solar panels and the electric collection vehicles and we have sponsored tree planting and bought areas of rain forest. I am looking forward to replacing everything we can with re-usable consumables so that I know that we have reduced our environmental and done the best we can.
