• Question: what is the target for nyour research

    Asked by rpeltz to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      The overall aim of my research is to find the most efficient way of protecting carbon-fibre aircraft against lightning strikes. When I say most efficient, the current method is to include a thin layer of metal in the carbon-fibre. However whilst this is 100% safe, metal is heavy and it adds a lot of weight onto the plane resulting in more fuel being required. So I’m looking at other methods which won’t add on so much weight but still be just as safe.

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Many of the scientists taking part of this are working on very specific projects — that is, their next 3 years (say) is devoted to a particular thing. In other cases, like me, the research is in a general zone, and I supervise (and work on myself) a collection of different projects each of which might have different targets. So, for me, my general ‘zone’ is intelligent computation, making computer software that solves problems and/or that makes sense of vast amounts of data. I have a number of projects running, some of these are about improving the basic algorithms and methods for certain kinds of problem solving, and some of them are about applying a method in a very specific area. E.g. one of the general projects is where I have a PhD student working on how to find out which are the most important genes when you have data about several thousands of genes. In one of the more specific projects, I have a PhD student trying to figure out, just from brainwave signals, if an epileptic patient will be resistant to drugs or not. If I try to encapsulate my overall ‘target’, it would be: “making good use of the things I know how to do”.

    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      The target for my research is to know in detail exactly how visual information is represented and processed in the brain – if you like, to find the “programs” that the brain is running to analyse the images it gets from our eyes.

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      The target of my research is to identify immune markers in blood that are associated with long-term protection from TB disease. That way we can give someone a vaccine, take a blood sample, measure the immune markers and tell if someone is protected or not. If they are not protected we can offer them a different vaccine or give them TB drugs. We can also use these “immune markers” to screen newl vaccines much more quickly.

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