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Asked by anon-259409 on 11 Sep 2020.
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Ashleigh Barron answered on 11 Sep 2020:
I work as a scientist in an engineering company as a laser physicist/engineer. Working in a company is a bit different than in a university, we’re focused on long term getting products that work to customers. I design lasers products that have to operate in extreme environment such as large temperature variations, or to work under vibration like when its attached to tanks or helicopters etc so a lot of my work is taking a design in a lab environment and making sure it works long term over the tougher environment.
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Constance Schere answered on 11 Sep 2020:
I am an interdisciplinary marine scientist and a PhD candidate, so I work in a number of different fields but I guess that common denominator in all of them is that I have to analyse the data I collect using different statistical methods. Depending on the research question I’m working on for my thesis, this could be biological data (e.g. species abundance) or social data (e.g. community questionnaire responses). If I’m not doing data analysis or writing, I’m in the field — which in my case is marine protected areas in the UK & Ireland so I get to spend much of my time on the seaside! Many PhD students also support teaching at their university, so I am also a graduate teaching assistant. This means I help professors teach their courses through grading, demonstrating, tutorials, and making sure the course runs smoothly. Scientists also attend conferences a few times a year to share their research with other scientists in that field and learn about the work of others. It’s great fun and you get to travel to different countries and cities!
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Josh Wolstenholme answered on 11 Sep 2020:
I work in a university as a PhD candidate and a research assistant. For my PhD I look at how flood management methods that are more sustainable like putting wood in rivers changes geomorphology and what the potential impact on their usefulness to reducing flood risk might be. I do this by going to different places and recording information about the management method, and then doing experiments by using computer models. For my research assistant work, I’m taking publicly available datasets and mapping them for the Hull, Teesside and York regions. These include things like CO2 emissions, crop locations, business locations – all are related to the bioeconomy; a really big industry! The idea is that business and governments can use this data to inform their practices.
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Emma Thorpe answered on 12 Sep 2020:
I work as part of a team carrying out testing on waste water, soil and sludge. We check for pollution and protect the environment. It involves a lot of preparing the samples ready to test – especially the soil. The testing can be for things like pH, fluoride, sulphide, metals, solid content or how much isn’t liquid. The waste water goes back into rivers so it can’t have high levels of these. The soil is tested to check how much fertiliser is needed so only as much is needed is used to grow plants.
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Ed Tunnacliffe answered on 15 Sep 2020: last edited 15 Sep 2020 9:18 am
Hi Leah,
Being a scientist involves doing all sorts of different things (which is why it’s a great job!).
Typically scientists will have a particular subject area which they know more about, and most of the time they will be working on trying to answer questions about that subject which we don’t yet know the answers to. For example, I am interested in understanding how red blood cells are made correctly in our bodies. We make about 200 billion new ones every day, so it’s really important to understand how this occurs normally so that when something goes wrong (in people with blood diseases) we can hopefully fix it. I am trying to answer questions about how certain genes in our DNA are turned on and off during the making of a red blood cell and I do this by making colourful movies of these cells under the microscope! I hope that one day this will help us to treat patients with genetic diseases like thalassaemia.
//If we’re lucky, scientists get to do lots of experiments (the fun bit!) to try and answer these types of questions. However, it is also important to present our results to other scientists to show what we found out in our studies. This is necessary because other scientists can then take that knowledge and do more experiments to find out answers to the next questions which arise from it. The whole process is a bit like taking lots of small steps towards a better understanding of nature, and by sharing our work we hope to take these steps a bit faster. This sharing of results is done by writing them down in a manuscript or ‘paper’, as well as giving presentations of the results in-person at a conference, for example. Therefore, scientists also spend their time writing papers and preparing presentations to clearly show what they have done in their experiments.
//While there are many other things, one final example of something scientists might do with their time is to talk to people like you! It’s really important for scientists to communicate with non-scientists about their work and what the results mean for the rest of society. This is particularly important in times such as now, where there is a public health situation and we are learning more and more every day about what the best way of dealing with it is. Hopefully, by having these kinds of conversation we can better understand the world we live in 🙂
I hope that helps to answer your question.
Ed
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Rachel Edwards answered on 15 Sep 2020:
I invent new ways of making, and using, sound. This might be to try and look for defects in things like railway tracks or pipes carrying oil and gas, to try and find problems so we can fix them before they break. I also like finding out how different materials behave at different temperatures.
In a normal day I do some teaching (I’m a lecturer at a university), and some experiments, and then write papers about the experiments we’ve done so people can find out about our work.
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Apple Chew answered on 16 Sep 2020:
I work on micro-algae, which are single-celled microorganisms that can photosynthesise! They’re basically simple plants (but plants are made from multiple cells). Most of the time I grow them under light in a flask and zap them with electricity to introduce DNA-editing molecules into the cells! 🙂
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Yueng Lenn answered on 17 Sep 2020:
In my science, I use ocean data to answer questions about how heat, freshwater and nutrients are moved around by ocean currents and processes that drive mixing between the different layers of the ocean. In the polar oceans, the heat lost by the ocean in winter results in the formation of sea ice and is a really important source of heat for high-latitude countries and can affect their weather. It is particularly exciting, but also at times depressing, to be pursuing these questions now when our planet is really beginning to experience some of the ravages of climate change.
Comments
anon-259348 commented on :
Cool