Dr Simone Badal-McCreath is focused on becoming a pioneer in cancer treatment......She is also working with a group of experts to create a novel JAMAICAN cancer cell line, since the Caucasian cell line is what is being mostly used for testing.

BY NADINE WILSON All Woman writer  Monday, March 03, 2014 

SHE was recently recognised as the leading young female chemist in Latin America and the Caribbean; holds two masters degrees and a doctorate; was named the Young Scientist of the Year in Jamaica in 2011; and has several other awards to boast about, but though noteworthy, Dr Simone Badal-McCreath believes her greatest achievement to date is having a good character.

Dr Simone Badal-McCreath

The 32-year-old believes she has her father and her Christian upbringing to thank for this and feels her tenacity to be her best self has spilled over into her professional and academic life. Now in the middle of her research aimed at developing drugs to treat cancer, managing a lab and lecturing, she is penning her first book A woman's journey to success.

"It redefines success as we know it, not meaning success in terms of achievement, but being at a place that is divinely designed," she said. "It's achieving what God has ordained for you to achieve, even if you were supposed to sweep the floor, you do it to the best of your ability and realise that in sweeping the floor, you are making an environment clean."

Dr Badal-McCreath has no doubt that her journey to becoming a top-ranked scientist was divinely ordained. Her intention throughout high school was to become a doctor, but then she was unable to do physics in CXC and decided to apply to do pure and applied sciences at the University of the West Indies (UWI) first in order to matriculate into medicine. However, she had a change of heart once she realised how much she loved bio-chemistry. more