Question: what is the most interesting thing you have found out about your job.

Jaclyn Bell answered on 12 Mar 2015:

Hmmmm I work on really technical mathematics and computer coding and so I don’t get to see much more than numbers most days! Sometimes I find interesting patterns in the results I get but mostly the interesting things I find out come from talking to other researchers in my department. Thats the good thing about research – everyone is working on their own thing and you can learn so much about different topics that you yourself may not be working on and so you build up a really good knowledge base. I did do a course at Daresbury Lab last year (which is near Runcorn) where I got to learn all about accelerator science and how the accelerators are designed and made, and we got to go into the labs and see the accelerators which was pretty cool 🙂 I learnt that you can use synchrotron light (produced by particle accelerators) to see proteins folding – I’m not much of a biologist but thats pretty amazing.