From the Latest Music Bar to the hospital lab: Angi Mariani's first in biomedical science

For six years the train between Brighton and Ipswich was Angi Mariani’s study room. On Monday 19 October, at a ceremony on Ipswich waterfront, she collected the result: a first-class degree in biomedical science from the University of Suffolk.

Mariani, 60, grew up in Ipswich and lives and works in Brighton. For 17 years she ran the Latest Music Bar there, put on music events from Brighton Palace Pier and ran Latest Records. She helped set up Latest TV, a local channel, where she presents and produces programmes. She has also spent about 13 years in public health, analysis and cancer information work.

Third time, a different science

The biomedical science degree is her third qualification, Suffolk Village Info News reported. The first was a first-class BA in social anthropology from the University of Sussex in 1991; the second, an MSc in epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2012.

She took the new degree part-time. For the last three years she has also worked as a medical laboratory assistant at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, and she still does. To get to Ipswich she travelled from Brighton and stayed with her mother for a couple of days a week.

“I did lots of work on the train,” she said. Her mother, who is 90, turned out to be part of the plan. “I used to tell people I was going to look after my 90-year-old mum, but really, she looked after me,” Mariani told the site.

Her mother and her husband, Mark, were at the graduation. Mariani is already working on what comes next: she is teaching herself AI-assisted animation and hopes to combine it with her science to explain how things work. “It’s a great feeling to graduate, but I have to work out a new routine now,” she said.

Why this matters

Mariani is doing something that has become less common. The Learning and Work Institute’s survey of adults in the UK found that 42% had taken part in some learning in the previous three years in 2025, down from 52% a year earlier, and 21% were learning at the time, down from 30%. Cost was a barrier for 24% of adults, against 8% in 2019. The Institute also found that people are 4% less likely to learn with each year of adult life.

Her route also shows how a lab can be a place to start, not only a place to end up. NHS Health Careers lists working as a healthcare science assistant, also called a medical laboratory assistant, as one of the ways into healthcare science, alongside accredited degrees and a degree apprenticeship. To practise as a biomedical scientist in a UK health service laboratory you must be registered with the HCPC (Health and Care Professions Council), and the Institute of Biomedical Science says the most efficient way there is an IBMS-accredited degree with its registration training portfolio.

How to start

If you are curious but out of practice, start with the question, not the course. Pick one subject, read about it for half an hour a week, and see if it holds you. Discover Uni, the official UK site run for the Office for Students, lets you search courses and filter for part-time study; in the US, community colleges are the usual place to try a class first.

If you are ready to enrol, ask admissions teams in writing what your earlier study counts for, and work out where the hours will come from before term starts. Mariani’s came from a train seat and a mother’s kitchen.

If the lab appeals, read the NHS Health Careers routes and check a degree’s IBMS accreditation before you apply, because that decides how directly it leads to registration.

Our guide to going back to study covers funding and first steps, and the story of Carl Allamby, who went from mechanic to emergency doctor, is another career that changed course through study.