Question: what made you interessted in this project?

Gemma Sharp answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Good question.

I first became interested in this sort of thing when I was doing my masters degree. I had to write a really big report on premature birth, and that made me realise how fascinating it was.

I just think it’s so weird that we still don’t know what happens to trigger labour in pregnant women. I think it’s one of those things people assume we know, but we really don’t, so I guess I thought it’d be interesting to try to understand more about that.

The computer modelling side of my project is something I’m really interested in too. It’s part of a branch of science called Systems Biology, which uses computers to understand complex biological systems. Child birth is the perfect example of a complex biological system because soooo much is going on and there are so many factors involved. I thought it would be really interesting to see how I could use a computer model to study child birth.