Met at Monash Sally and Brian
Met at Monash – Sally Sim and Brian Szeto
A minor annoyance. Friend of a friend. Sometime colleague. Sally and Brian’s story began slowly but had a very happy ending.
As eight-month-old baby Oliver chats away happily next to her, Sally Sim (BPharmSci, 2009) can’t help but draw comparisons with his dad – her husband, Brian (BPharmSci, 2010) – who she first met in the Monash laboratories more than a decade ago. “Oliver is definitely like Brian,” she says. “He talks a lot!”
Indeed, that was her first impression of the honours student who had joined the pharmaceutical sciences laboratory at Monash in 2011, where Sally was working as a research assistant. At that time, Sally sat next to a friend of Brian’s – which meant that Brian was a regular visitor to their section of the office to catch up with his friend. “He was always popping into our office to chat. He didn’t have an access card and because I sat right next to the door, I was always having to open it for him,” she says. But what started off as annoyance soon blossomed into friendship.
Today, Sally is the Quality and Systems Coordinator at the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre (MMIC) at Monash, but it was only in her final years in high school that Sally undertook some science subjects and found she really enjoyed them, and decided she might be interested in studying medical science.
At the time, there was a course available at Monash that appealed to her interest in chemistry, so Sally enrolled. She didn’t have a career path in mind, but towards the end of her degree she was drawn to the idea of getting into research, and began working in a lab on the formulation of powders for inhaled medicine delivery.
It was around this time that Brian joined the lab, with the same supervisor as Sally. “We shared the same lab, and then obviously there’s all this socialising and networking happening,” she says. “I found him quite a character.” The pair became friends, and after a couple of years, “things just happened”, Sally recalls.
Sally has remained in the pharmaceutical arena. After working as a research assistant at Monash, she joined pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline for a couple of years, although she found herself still working with many of her colleagues at Monash. Then the opportunity came to return to Monash to work as a laboratory manager. “I’ve always liked quality – maybe because of my obsessive nature, I feel like everything has to be in a specific way,” she laughs. While she’s enjoying her time on maternity leave, Sally is looking forward to returning to the lab.
Brian’s career took a different course. After working as a research assistant at Monash, he moved to pharmaceutical company Baxter as a quality assurance associate. But he wanted something different, Sally says, so he decided to return to university to study accounting and finance. That then led to a job as an accountant, then a consultant at KPMG, and finally he moved to the Australian Energy Regulator, where he now works as Senior Data Analyst.
Sally and Brian married in 2018, and Sally says their shared background means it’s easy to talk shop. “He understands what I’m working on, because it’s similar to what he did back when he was at Baxter,” she says. “Often when I have questions, I ask him.”
The pharmaceutical science community in Melbourne is a pretty small one, and Brian and Sally still hang out with many of their old colleagues from the lab where the pair first met. “Everyone knows everyone, because we’re all from Monash,” she says. “It’s a really, really tight community.”
