• Question: What is the most interesting part of your work?

    Asked by anon-256723 on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Joe Matthews

      Joe Matthews answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      For me the most interesting part about my job is just how much variety it has.
      There are so many types of food and each of them has different steps that take it from it’s raw ingredient to the finished product and it’s my job to understand those steps and design equipment that achieves them. This means I’m always learning and coming up against new challenges and problems to solve.

    • Photo: Azarmidokht Gholamipour-Shirazi

      Azarmidokht Gholamipour-Shirazi answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Well, I am a scientist and most of the time the experiments fail. But the most interesting part is the time when I print food and it retains its shape (the experiment is successful). This is the time that you can see me dancing in the lab!!

    • Photo: Bethan John

      Bethan John answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      The most interesting part of my work is learning how to do the experiments in the lab, you follow a protocol – almost like a recipe for the experiment. Most of my lab work uses small mud snails which can be a host for parasites called Liver Fluke which I study in my PhD. In the UK Liver Fluke causes disease in meat and milk producing animals like cows in sheep. We keep the snails in little tanks in the lab which are filled with mud and feed them algae each day!

    • Photo: Martin Lott

      Martin Lott answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      I come from a computing background and do a lot of data analysis, I don’t really understand the significance of many of my results so when I get to discuss them with the relevant expert then it can transpire that I have found something interesting.

      For example, we were recently analysing some Salmonella genetic data (genomes) and we found a part of the genome which is very highly conserved and widely distributed, that is, it is the same/similar across many strains. Biological experts had some interesting name for this and theories about how it could happen.

    • Photo: Boglarka Gulyas

      Boglarka Gulyas answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      For me, it’s learning new things – in addition to doing my own research (and hopefully getting some interesting results!) there are always opportunities to learn new skills and find out about cool things that other scientists have discovered.

    • Photo: Dimitra Angelopoulou

      Dimitra Angelopoulou answered on 13 Jun 2020:

      Even though it is annoying and demoralising for some experiments to go wrong and give me false results, it is interesting to be able to troubleshoot what went wrong and find solutions to fix it. As a scientist, it is important to have critical thinking and sometimes failed experiments can lead to other more interesting/challenging ones!

    • Photo: Andy Timms

      Andy Timms answered on 18 Jun 2020:

      It’s the constant challenges involved in what we are doing.
      To design the experiments we need to think about how we do them and what hypotheses we are testing and how that all fits in with our own and other peoples research.
      We then need to be able to carry out the experiments, so technical and pratical knowledge.
      The most exciting part for me is I get to see the results and think about them and form conclusions before anyone else sees them.
      So the variety of what we do makes for interesting ways to pass the day.

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