• Question: What was the first piece of work related to the subject you do now?

    Asked by cotterill to Andy, Alice JB on 18 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Andy Norton

      Andy Norton answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      That’s an interesting question! In terms of any work that I have done towards my PhD (which I started a couple of years ago), my first piece of work was to look at how my ceramics break when they are put in tension (so when the sample is being pulled apart rather than squashed). I did this so that I could understand if I had made my ceramics properly (so, in order to make them, I need to grind up some powder in water, then remove the water in a vacuum, press the fine powder in a die, and then place it in a furnace at 1600C. Once they have been fired, I then have to polish my samples and cut them up. It takes a long time!). By measuring the stress required to cause failure of my samples, I could work out if all of those steps were done right. If they weren’t, then I needed to get them sorted before I started on my other tests. That’s often the case with science – there is often quite a bit of preliminary work to do before you can do the “proper” tests. There’s no point rushing into it and finding that something basic wasn’t right!

      I actually had done a little bit of work with ceramics before I started my PhD – I did some other work on similar materials for my final year project when I was an undergrad student at Uni. That’s sort of how I got interested in ceramics and decided that I wanted to look into it further. So, that’s sort of two answers really!

    • Photo: Alice Jones Bartoli

      Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I love telling people about this. When I was 21, I worked with children with autism, these children weren’t very good at working out what other people were thinking and feeling, and so sometimes they found themselves in trouble because they didn’t really understand the right things to do in certain situations. I got interested in the idea that not understanding how you and other people were thinking and feeling might explain the reasons why other children (who weren’t autistic) might get into trouble.

      My first psychology experiment was looking at whether children with behavioural problems could accurately understand other people’s thoughts and feelings. The results of this work showed that some children have difficulties understanding what it feels like to be scared or sad – this was really important because we realise that we need to try and work with these children in a different way, and try to help them to understand how hurtful their behaviour can be, and why that’s not ok. This is something that I’m working on now. I’m also very pleased with this work, because the very beginning ideas won a prize when I was at university – so I’m glad it’s been able to develop.

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