Question: What was the poster prize exactly about and how did you go about solving it?

Rehemat Bhatia answered on 5 Mar 2018:

At scientific conferences, there are usually two types of presentation: a poster presentation where you show a pictorial representation of what you have been working on and a presentation where you talk about what you have been working on. Students are given the opportunity for their presentations to be entered into a competition, and if you are lucky enough, you can win!

I went to a conference in a city called Utrecht in the Netherlands in 2016 (http://icp12.uu.nl/), which was all about palaeoceanography, or the study of past oceans. I presented a poster, showing chemical results I had got from the plankton I work on (foraminifera).

I got these results using 2 chemical machines – one which zaps lots of x-rays at plankton shells to find out how much magnesium is in the shells (and how much variation there is within the shells), and another which dissolves plankton shells in acid (similar to when you put chalk in lemon juice) and measures how much oxygen and carbon is in the gas that is given off.

These results showed me that both the magnesium patterns within the shell, and the amounts of oxygen and carbon was different between different plankton species. This is really cool, because it means we can understand how plankton used to live using two methods, rather than just relying on one to tell us the answer.

I was awarded the poster prize on the final day of the conference, and it was completely unexpected. It made me feel particularly happy because this was the first academic prize I have ever won. I never won anything like this at school, or during my first degree at university. It just goes to show that it’s still possible to win academic prizes after you leave school – opportunities to win prizes really do exist afterwards too! You just have to work hard and be motivated 🙂