• Question: when you have achieved your goal what do you think you will start working on and why will you start working on one particular thing when there are so many other thing to do or discover?

    Asked by candy90090 to Will, Suze, Mike, James, David on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: David Ingram

      David Ingram answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I have a photograph on my office wall by Jean Guichard http://www.alphapix.com/jument.shtml (you can see the whole lighthouse on http://www.postershop.co.uk/Guichard-Jean/Guichard-Jean-Phare-dans-la-Tempete-La-Jument-II-8400292.html ) Its a brilliant picture which shows lots of great fluid flows phenomena – breaking waves, Mach reflection, etc. I tell everyone when I can build a computer model which simulates it I will retire.

      At the moment we can do some things (e.g. break up an spray from a small part of one wave) but the whole problem is very complex. So I may have to work for the next 100 years!!!!

    • Photo: James Marrow

      James Marrow answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I don’t expect to reach my major goal – but that’s because it’s a really challenging one “to understand and predict how the microstructure of a material causes it to fail” There are so many different materials and so many ways to break them!

      I do set nearer goals, but then move onto the next one as each is achieved. It’s also good to look out for new opportunities that come up unexpectedly. I think it was Garfield who said “As you go through the forest, don’t forget to stop and eat some flowers on the way” 🙂

    • Photo: Suze Kundu

      Suze Kundu answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      My current goal is to finish my PhD. I love the subject that I’m working on, and I’d like to carry on within the area of solar energy conversion after this, but it would be interesting to see it from a slightly different perspective, and learn about something a little bit different. It would still be heading towards the main goal, but gives me something new to think about!

    • Photo: William Eborall

      William Eborall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I’m not sure what I’ll go on to do once I finish my PhD, but there is something I’m very interested in that I’d like to study in more detail.

      There are molecules used by all living things called enzymes. Enzymes are proteins which carry out chemical reactions, changing a chemical from one thing into an other. Over the past 40 years our understanding of how they work has exploded to the point where we’re almost able to design and create an enzyme in the lab to do any reaction we chose. I’d love to work somewhere where I could try to do this. Even if we couldn’t do it, it would teach us so much about how enzymes work.

    • Photo: Mike Dodd

      Mike Dodd answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Heya, My goal is the same as Suze and Will, finish my PhD! Once I have done that I’m not sure what I will work on next. I think I would like to go and work for the Wellcome trust (hint hint). I want to help educate people on the brilliance of science. That’s why I’m loving I’m A scientist 🙂

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