• Question: What makes your work stand out from the others?

    Asked by Jamie K. to Anne, Arthur, Rose, Ruhina, Thomas on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Ruhina Miller

      Ruhina Miller answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      I would say that all aspects of research are important – there are some that need to be in the spotlight because they directly target world issues, such as researching new drugs to fight cancer, tackling global warming or looking for renewable energy resources, but equally there are other scientists that make this possible. Without scientists discovering new reactions these drugs may not be possible, without new materials we might not find better materials, or without people inventing new techniques to analyse things we might overlook something simply because we couldn’t understand it fully. So I wouldn’t say that any one person’s work particularly stands out because all science is part of being in a team or built on previous discoveries – even if it is simply using a microscope that someone else, long ago, invented 🙂

    • Photo: Rose Simnett

      Rose Simnett answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I think that my research is a little different to others as mine is funded by a company. That means that I work at the university but have regular meetings with the company to talk about the work that I’m doing. We work together to produce something that the company could use in a product.

    • Photo: Thomas Farrugia

      Thomas Farrugia answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      Hi Jamie – I’d say my work has a different twist to it because it’s at the interface between biology and chemistry, but then again there’s a lot of work which also does that. However we are coming up with a different approach to enzyme catalysis, which means that if this works it’d be quite novel. However it’s worth bearing in mind that there is a lot of research going on at the same time, and most of it is great stuff, so making one’s work stand out is intrinsically harder – however it can be done, especially if it’s original, although timing and the scientific “mood” of the time also affect how likely it’ll be noticed (some major discoveries went unnoticed for quite a while – at times the scientists who proposed the discoveries had already died!)

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