• Question: Why do you give money away when you could be using it on your own experiments?

    Asked by skyeoa99 to Katharine on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Hi skyeoa99,
      Well, I don’t actually do my own experiments anymore – giving money away in the form of research grants is my job! After my degree I did a PhD which is a sort of training in research, and you get a qualification at the end of it. When I got to the end of that, I had to think about what I wanted to do next and in the end I decided that a career in research wasn’t for me. So now my job works very closely with scientists, and I have to make sure that we’ve got all the information and advice we need to decide how best to spend the money. It’s really interesting and uses a lot of the skills I developed in doing research, like being logical and analytical. If you do science there’s lots of different directions it can take you, not everyone ends up doing research as a career!

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