Question: What is an instrument scientist and why do you like it?

Silvia Imberti answered on 4 Mar 2019:

An instruments scientist is a scientist who has responsibility for an instrument, so in addition to doing science, I look after this machine from the technical point of view (with a team of expert technicians to support me) and from the scientific point of view. This means I advertise the instrument capabilities, invite people to use it, help them devising their experiment and performing it and understanding the results and writing a paper about it (there is always a paper at the end of scientific project… well, almost always!). My instrument is called SANDALS (I know! I didn’t get to pick the name!) and it is bigger than me 🙂 It sits in a room on its own because it gets radioactive and I load my samples (the things I want to study) using a crane. I guess the crane is the part I like best 🙂

I like being an instrument scientist because I like to help people, I like to talk to them and understand their (scientific) problem and how to go about solving it. I like to meet people from all over the world.

Sometimes to help my “users” (that how we call the instrument “customers”) I also need a bit of psychological intuition: understand what the relationship between them is, reading between lines… (but sssst! don’t tell them!)