• Question: what do you in your scince work

    Asked by cwawsome to Omur, Maddison, Jimi, Hayley, Chris on 9 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by imbritsh, 539sgde23, ruth121212, eleanor, Pravz.
    • Photo: Hayley Moulding

      Hayley Moulding answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      In my science work, I work with families all over the UK. We are the families lots and lots of questions about their behaviours, what they like and dislike and try and find out about their mental health (how healthy their brains are and their emotions.) I then look at their sleep too. I do an experiment which measure the activity in children’s brains and I look at how this differs in their sleep. I ask lots of questions about sleep too. Once I have measure the brain activity and got my questionnaires, I do lots of data analysis to work out if these children have sleep problems and any other problems.

    • Photo: Omur Tastan

      Omur Tastan answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      In my science work, I study how brain develops and what affects this development in good ways or bad ways. Generally things that affect stem cell development will also affect how our brains turn out. 🙂
      To do all this, I use fruit flies. They are the flies that you on bananas or grapes on a hot summer day-if you leave them out for 2-3 days:) I can differentiate the males from females with naked eye! 🙂

      I dissect the brains of fruit fly larvae and stain them with different markers and look for any morphological/shape/structure/organisation defects!

    • Photo: Jimi Wills

      Jimi Wills answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      I run a mass spectrometry facility, where I help other scientists measure all the molecules in their experiments. It means they can see which molecules are involved in a particular disease, or which are involved in how a drug works.

      The mass spec makes millions of number per second, and I have to write computer programs to help us understand them.

    • Photo: Maddison Coke

      Maddison Coke answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      In my work I look after a big metal box which I then take all the air out of. In this box I then use beams of different materials to create new ones. Its a bit like cooking. These new materials can do interesting things with electricity because they are so thin, thinner than the thickness of your hair. So to use them we also have to use wires thinner then your hair, so it all gets a bit tricky but then i can do fun things like make smiley faces out of gold that are the size of a pin head!

    • Photo: Chris Conselice

      Chris Conselice answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      I study the formation and evolution of galaxies through observational approaches using telescopes as part of large international teams. My goals are to find the first galaxies to from in the universe and to understand how galaxies form and evolve. I use telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as lead an international research programme utilising telescopes from around the world in which scientists from eight countries are involved with. I investigate using data from these various telescopes, and especially the Hubble Space Telescope, the role that physical processes such as galaxy mergers, star formation, and the role of black holes play in galaxy formation. I investigate how galaxies change from small low mass systems when the universe was only a few hundred million years old to the mature galaxies we see today over 13.5 billion years later.

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