My friend Paula Heister, who has died aged 40 of cancer, trained in medicine and taught the subject at Cambridge University, but she also worked as a children’s author and illustrator. A 2025 book, Career Planning for Doctors by Caroline and Naomi Elton, features Paula’s illustrations and cites Paula herself as an example of doctors taking their careers beyond medical boundaries into other domains.

Harvard University had recently awarded her a fellowship, for a project bridging medicine and art in an exploration of dying.

Her artwork was exhibited across the UK, in Bologna and in Hamburg. Her children’s book, Glow, which was highly commended at the 2023 World Illustration awards, used phosphorescent paint to bring a glow-in-the-dark rabbit to life and explain the science behind nighttime luminescence.

Paula also considered medicine through poetry; in 2023 in the journal Ars Medica she compared hospital patients’ care to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold-inflected lacquer.

She was born in Münsterlingen, Switzerland. Her father, Peter Schroeder-Heister, is a professor of logic; her mother, Gabi Heister, was an experimental neuropsychologist. In 1989 the family moved to Tübingen, south Germany, and then to London in 1997 when Paula’s father took a sabbatical at University College London; she went to the German school, in Richmond upon Thames, and then Marymount International school in Kingston upon Thames. When the family returned to Germany, she completed her schooling at the International school in Stuttgart.

On her return to Britain Paula studied psychology, philosophy and physiology at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Receiving prizes at each stage, she continued through Oxford with a doctorate in pharmacology. She was president of Oxford University fencing club, where she met Chris Jones, who was a postgraduate at St Anne’s College, and they married in 2023.

Paula went on to train in medicine at Imperial College London, and also worked as a model. From 2020 she taught medicine at Cambridge, and was a bye-fellow at Downing College, while she completed a master’s degree in children’s book illustration at the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University.

I first met Paula in 2009, at a 7am fencing training session in Oxford. She was hilarious, droll and loving – a person to whom you told everything. She was more relentlessly upbeat and idealistic than anyone I knew, and more sweary (she learned English from the TV show Father Ted).

Even when ill, she put others first. “Keep starting over,” she wrote in a graduation message composed for her Cambridge medical students. “You are not one thing. As humans we are all scientists, and all artists, and all athletes, and all potential saints.”

Paula and Chris divided their time between Cambridge and Austria, where Chris was teaching at the University of Vienna. She gave her last energies to becoming my son’s godmother in the Vienna General hospital chapel, planning readings, hymns and, typically, gifts.

Paula is survived by Chris, her parents, Gabi and Peter, her brother, Justin, and niece, Julia.