Professor Alison Jones was raised in a Welsh mining town, neatly nestled between sea and mountains. Little wonder then that she feels at home in Wollongong.

Both grandfathers were miners, one a coalminer, while the other mined slate. She can still recall them coming home from work covered in the dust of their labour. On the hands of the coalminer were the blue stains of a "natural tattoo", where coal dust had seeped into an open wound causing permanent markings.

In her clinical work as a physician at Wollongong Hospital, where once a fortnight she treats poisoned and general medical patients, she can easily spot a coalminer because of those same characteristic blue markings under their skin. For Jones, those chance encounters are a welcome link to her childhood, a link to her family.

"I'm a Welsh girl from a mining community and so I feel very content in the Illawarra," she says. "I come from an ordinary family and every time I'm connected with the mining community it feels normal. It's interesting to me to marry up my personal history with my professional interests.

"When I'm treating a coalminer, all the memories come flooding back and I have to know what part of the mine they worked in. I'm fascinated by the whole thing."

Jones was recently appointed the new Executive Dean of Science, Medicine and Health at the University of Wollongong, having worked as Dean of the Graduate School of Medicine since 2011.

Links to the past is one of the reasons why the Illawarra will never lose the internationally-recognised toxicologist to a much larger city-based university. That, and the belief that at the UOW there are greater opportunities to be had.

"The reason I won't move to Sydney is because here is where the difference can be made. Here I can work with the community and with the hospitals. There's a potential for growth in the Illawarra that can't be found elsewhere," she says.

Even though her new role has her heading several health and science-based faculties, Jones is keen to point out that she's no paper pusher. She leads by example, keeping up her clinical work at Wollongong and Blacktown Hospitals, where she works as both an on-call toxicologist and as a mentor to young doctors.

As one of about 20 toxicologists in the country, Jones also holds key government positions in the field and is often called on to give advice in the courts.

She is also a director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an independent think tank made up of a body of experts to examine and give advice on future challenges facing Australia's defence leaders. As a toxicologist, Jones' contribution is on chemical terrorism.

"I can't talk about that," she says when asked for more detail.

"Other than to say it's about protecting the community against potential chemical threats."

Jones is a former director of Britain's National Poisons Service, a position that also had her give similar advice to the British government on a range of toxicology issues, including chemical attacks.

On July 7, 2005, she experienced terrorism firsthand when Muslim extremists bombed London Underground, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700. Jones was on duty at the time.

"Your professional training gets you through those times," she says. "It was very much putting into professional practice what we had been rehearsing for many years. I went into professional mode but it was a pretty unusual day. I was also actively involved in admitting patients who had been involved in the bombings. So I have some strong memories of it."

She has also helped solve several criminal investigations. In 1994, Jones was on the case when a rogue biochemist poisoned his wife and daughter with the drug atropine, a derivative of the potentially fatal nightshade plant. The matter was made more complex when other people began presenting to casualty with similar symptoms. It was Jones who initially identified a pattern.

"We thought it was pretty unusual that people kept coming through the door with these unusual signs of poisoning," Jones says. "That set off the investigation."

It was discovered that the scientist had attempted to cover his tracks by lacing bottles of tonic water at an Edinburgh supermarket with the same drug. He was caught on CCTV and later served a jail term for attempted murder.

In 2006, just before coming to Australia, Jones was involved in the high profile case of the poisoning of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

While he lay on his deathbed in a London hospital, she ruled out that he had been poisoned with thallium. Instead it was later discovered he had been poisoned by radioactive polonium-210.

"Everything is a team sport around these sorts of investigations," she says.

Jones moved to Australia because she says it's a toxicological wonderland with its poisonous snakes, spiders and marine envenomation.

"I moved here to do something more challenging," she says. "It was time to spread the experience and do things differently. I think Australia is great for that. You wake up one day and realise there's only so much you can do in your own leadership domain. You need a position where you can make a broader difference.

"Here I can take my passion and convert it into lots of young students. I can make an impact on the world as one person or if I train the next generation of health scientists and doctors, then that's a much bigger impact.

"I see my role as executive dean about inspiring others towards best scientific and clinical practices."

Soon after settling in Australia, Jones was called to a toxic emergency in Western Australia when 4000 purple-headed lorikeets had dropped out of the sky. An investigation uncovered that strong winds had carried dust from lead carbonate over the port of Esperance. It was later revealed that the dead birds had not died from lead poisoning but possibly from pesticide.

However, if the birds hadn't dropped from the sky when they did, authorities might not have been alerted to the lead contamination and may not have been able to contain it before it caused harm to the town's children.

Other toxic emergencies include the Orica hexavalent chromium leak in 2011 at Kooragang Island in which Jones and other experts ruled out that there had been any serious health risk to the residents of Stockton.

"There's a formal toxicology risk assessment process that has to be done in these situations," says Jones. "Initially, everything is a worry until you can work out if there's been a significant dose of poison or not. In this case there wasn't."

She continues to be a toxicology adviser to the NSW Ministry of Health and is on the Botany Bay Expert Steering Group that evaluates risks to the community from mercury and other toxins.

She's also heavily involved in research projects through her students.

"I don't think I can be the best executive dean unless I'm actively involved in research, I'm actively teaching, as well as doing the science and medicine," she says. "It's about external and internal credibility and tapping into that energy because if I'm doing what I'm trained to do then that's going to spill onto every aspect of my leadership role at this university."

She hopes being a female executive dean and toxicologist will encourage girls to consider a science-based career.

"We are nuts as a nation if we don't use half of the smarts of the population."

She has already set some high goals for her faculty.

"I want to produce the best faculty of Science, Medicine and Health anywhere in Australia," she says. "I want to grow our research agenda that puts the university on the world map. I want this university to be even better than it is now. So we've hatched a plan to focus on world class research that really uses our best brains to solve some of society's issues and on serving the needs of our students into the future to give them a world class education."

It's amazing what Jones manages to squeeze into her life. "I'm wonder woman," she says joking. "I don't have kids and I don't have a lot of rest or down time. I think it's a question of I love what I do and that's what makes it easy. I would never want to give up my clinical work and scientific toxicology."

To relax, Jones has a passion for sailing and races on Lake Macquarie and offshore.

She agrees her life has at times resembled a television drama - aka Quincy M.E.

"Those shows always fascinate me by the speed in which they appear to get their toxicological result. "They come back almost instantly and it makes me laugh because, clearly, analytically it takes a lot longer that."