https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.124.46

Professor Myra Nimmo, Emeritus Professor of Metabolic Physiology, University of Birmingham, UK

Myra Nimmo is an Olympic long jump athlete, who held the Scottish long jump record for 39 years. Her academic career as an exercise physiologist included being a professor at the University of Strathclyde, Pro Vice-Chancellor Research at Loughborough University, and both Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. In 2016, Nimmo was appointed the Chair of England Athletics, and she retired from her time in this post earlier this year.

What have you valued most about membership of The Physiological Society over the years?

Initially, I became a member of the Physiological Society in 1984. At this time, of course, The Society was very different. To become a member, your name was placed in a book for others to sign and support. This early part of my career was when I found an enormous amount of benefit from The Society.

The benefit of being a member back when I was an academic came from being able to present before the study was complete and to share preliminary data. It was common for the author when asked “Do you wish this to be published?” to answer “No” as the value and the reason for presenting was to gain insight from those in the audience as to how best to progress or interpret unexpected findings.

As students received free accommodation and attendance, it was also hugely beneficial for my group to be away from their home university and to meet, discuss their work and socialise with others in their field. My students, all of whom presented and became members of The Society benefitted hugely in the skill of how to present with the traffic light system being used on timings and the number of slides allowed. To this day, as I sit through some lengthy presentations, I wish many more had experienced that training regimen!

Tell us a bit about the projects you were involved in during your years as a physiologist.

I was fortunate to be involved in many aspects where my work as a physiologist allowed me to lead on a number of national projects including the establishment of the National Centre for Exercise for Sport Medicine, a joint project based at Loughborough University, University College London and Leeds. The National Centre is a legacy project from the 2012 Olympic Games which aims to foster world-class research that will lead to long-term systemic changes to benefit England.

At Loughborough and Birmingham, I was fortunate to work with military colleagues in the development and shape of the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre, a state-of-the-art clinical facility for injured service men and women. The programme also includes the potential to develop a national clinical rehabilitation facility where the expertise that exists within defence medicine could be shared for the benefit of England.

England Athletics (EA) is the Governing Body for grass roots activity to competitive level at Commonwealth Games in England. It is therefore necessary for EA to work closely with our partner UK Athletics who is responsible for teams from all the Home Nations. This allowed a smooth transition from young athlete to elite. EA is very much smaller than the latter 2 Universities I worked at and had considerably smaller numbers of support staff. No large HR or Development funding departments but the functions and expertise is still required. The sport, as a whole, is dependent on volunteers and therefore leading the Board and the executive is much closer to my role at Loughborough as Pro Vice Chancellor Research, where I had little or no budget and had to drive the progress through collaborative working with the Deans and working through influencing and persuading staff of the direction of travel. Similarly, the matrix management required to deliver inter-university research projects was paramount in our work with UK Athletics. Essentially different organisations, different cultures with staff paid by different masters, but on any specific topic working as a team.

What were the most difficult parts of running of your experiments?  

My PhD studies were on Thoroughbred racehorses and the most difficult part of these experiments was not getting kicked or bitten as you tried to draw blood or take muscle biopsies from these beautiful animals. Doing research on humans was no less demanding but getting bitten or kicked was not usually an issue!

Most of our exercise experiments on humans required participants to be fasted and by default started early in the morning for the subjects and even earlier for the researchers. An empathy for the subjects was of course paramount whether they were elite athletes or obese or elderly people. Our experiments were invasive and demanding for the subjects and it was always of concern to ensure that they were as comfortable as they could be.

What have you learned over the course of your work about how to balance productivity and mental health? 

As an athlete, I have always relied on exercise to relieve stress. Training for the Olympics and preparing for my finals at Glasgow University at the same time, was perversely ideal for me. I was usually fortunate enough that if one aspect was not going well, I could disappear into the other for a few hours.

Have you collaborated across different sectors, and if so, what lessons did you learn? 

Working in exercise physiology it was imperative that I engaged with other fields. The first obvious observation is how differently sectors work and communicate. I found, as a generalisation, clinicians were very big team orientated, with access to specialist laboratory and technical facilities.

Much of my own group’s work was contained within our own laboratories – if a new assay was needed, we set about developing and validating it, rather than request a central laboratory to analyse the samples or similarly running the data. This alternative way of working opened up enormous opportunities but required that as a physiologist I still fully understood exactly what was done and what the statistics was telling me.

The largest collaboration (£4.5M from the National Institute of Health Research) was as the Loughborough lead in the Biomedical Research Unit (BMU) jointly with the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. The BMU was entitled Diet, Lifestyle and Physical Activity and investigated interventions to manage chronic disease. My colleagues at Leicester, led by Professor Melanie Davies were experts in diabetes but we also engaged under this topic with experts in Fatty Liver Disease and Renal Disease.

What advice would you give to yourself as an A-level student? 

I started University studying mathematics and statistics, but my athletics career made me curious about biology and in second year I switched over to biological sciences with no firm career plan in mind. I think I was surprised with my progress in academe. I had never anticipated undertaking a PhD when I started my degree, nor anticipating winning a postdoctoral Wellcome Fellowship following the PhD. Throughout my career I hope I made the most of the opportunities that I was given and pursued activities that I enjoyed. This was probably best illustrated when after years working in Scotland, and achieving my Chair, I believed that I would remain in Glasgow until retirement. I have never regretted responding to the post at Loughborough and then Birmingham- which were certainly not pre-planned.

What are the main challenges you’ve encountered during your career? 

Not dissimilar to many lab-based academic researchers who are carers, it is difficult to be flexible. When my sons were young it was just not possible to travel to conferences or to spend time in international labs – the Physiological Society conference in the UK was vital to keep networks alive as there was always the highest quality work being discussed.

What do you enjoy about the sector you work in, and what is challenging about it?  

The joy is that physiology gives you such a broad base and allows you to work across many domains from the genomic level to applications to elite athletes training programmes. I think I have had the chance to work across all these levels, and this kept my science relevant and alive.