• Question: why are you studying this?

    Asked by michel1 to Jo, Alice JB, Andy, Barbara, James on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by rivett.
    • Photo: Jo Hulsmans

      Jo Hulsmans answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      When I started studying at 18 I had no idea what I wanted to do, other than: “Genetics is cool, I want to do research in that.” During my studies I spent 2 months in Togo (West Africa), as an exchange student, and I became very interested in agriculture. One of the many problems west african farmers have is that they have no money for fertiliser, and even if they did, their soils are not very suited to agriculture with fertilisers.
      Fertiliser has 3 important chemical elements: Phosphorus, Potassium and most importantly: Nitrogen. If we can make plants that don’t need fertiliser for nitrogen it could be an enormous help to poorer farmers.
      Another very important reason is the climate: Making and applying fertiliser is pretty terrible for the environment, almost 50% of CO2 emissions of agriculture are from nitrogen fertiliser. If we could make better plants that no longer need as much fertiliser it could be another step in stopping climate change.

    • Photo: Barbara Guinn

      Barbara Guinn answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I find cancer research really interesting. I love that it is medically important (it’s what I find interesting but that isn’t the same for everyone) and I like that my work may affect how people are treated and may even help more people survive cancer. It is exciting to me and after many years studying this subject I have lots of friends who are also scientists who also work on similar or complimentary ideas. I have always thought that discovering a new gene would be exciting and I have been very lucky to have been able to do that.

    • Photo: Andy Norton

      Andy Norton answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      The idea of my research (i.e. smashing ceramics) came because people don’t really understand this at the moment. For example, people in the military are making plates to go on the outside of tanks – these are made of ceramics, like the type of thing that you eat off (although a bit more fancy!). So that they can make these as strong and as hard as possible (hard enough to stop bullets from both hand-held guns and maybe even from tanks), people needed to investigate how and why ceramics break when they are hit. If we can work out how they break when smashed (either with a bullet, or in a compressing machine like I use), then maybe we can work out how to make them better.

      So, my experiments will hopefully help because we can get a better idea of how these ceramics break up when hit with things, and so we can work out ways to make them stronger, tougher, harder etc., and so we can get better armour for people and for tanks. So even though I am doing a very small aspect of a very big topic, my results should hopefully help get better equipment for soldiers, which is pretty cool.

      Away from the military side (although that is obviously an important aspect), learning how these ceramics break and what they sound like when they break could lead to other important technological changes in the future. Ceramics are used in artificial hip-joint, brakes in fast cars, building structures, etc. – if we can understand how these things break, then we can try and make better things in the future.

    • Photo: Alice Jones Bartoli

      Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I think it’s really important to understand what makes people antisocial. Violence and crime are some of the most harmful things that can happen to a person – and the cost to society is huge. I think that it’s important to try and stop bad behaviour developing too far, so I want to work with children who have behavioural problems to better understand the reasons that bad behaviour developed, and to better treat it early on. It’s MUCH easier to treat a child with behavioural problems while they’re young, than wait until they’re an adult and in prison.

      I’m really interested in the idea that if you have trouble understanding your own feelings, then it’s tough to really manage your own behaviour properly. My work aims to better understand the difficulties that some children have in understanding their own thoughts and feelings, and teaching them to have more choices about the way that they behave – you don’t always have to hit someone or shout and swear – they are other ways of getting your point across. I hope that my work will stop some children from heading off on a pathway towards more trouble – some children are now able to be at school and learn, instead of being excluded and not learning at school – this is important and I want to continue this.

    • Photo: James Jennings

      James Jennings answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I am studying this firstly because I am interested in the area of “green chemistry”. The main goals of green chemistry are: to reduce pollution and waste, to use renewable supplies of chemicals, and to make chemical processes more energy efficient and safer.

      These goals are very important, given the current situation of climate change and expanding population. We need to start recycling the chemicals that are in short supply, whilst also reducing the nasty chemicals that we are releasing into the environment.

      My work uses a renewable source- carbon dioxide (CO2)- which is also able to be easily recycled, and is less environmentally damaging that most chemicals (though of course CO2 does cause problems of its own!). The CO2 we use is actually the waste from the process that makes the fertiliser Jo mentioned, so by finding an extra use for it we are helping to reduce the emission of the gas.

      I hope that my work proves to be another chemical process that can be done in a “green” way, and it may even lead to some useful new properties of the materials I make.

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