• Question: how will your work and reasearch affect others?

    Asked by 10bainb to Duncan, Kiran, Paul, Sarah, Sharon on 17 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Duncan Murdock

      Duncan Murdock answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      I hope my research with help to solve some of the mysteries of the origins of the amazing array of different shells, bones and teeth that animals have and maybe why they came about in the first place. It might also inspire other people to work on these problems too.

    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Hopefully, the work I am doing at the moment will increase our knowledge of how embryos develop and why things sometimes go wrong in pregnancy. As well as this, the stem cells that I am making have the potential to go on and help cure diseases like cancer and diabetes or Parkinson’s disease!.

    • Photo: Kiran Meekings

      Kiran Meekings answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Far too many people are suffering from cancer (I reckon about 6,000,000 people on this planet this very moment) so my research is going to try and help decrease that number… Any drugs we can develop to help any particular cancer will save lives and make the world a happier (and healthier) place!

    • Photo: Paul Stevenson

      Paul Stevenson answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      The first people who will care about my work are other people working in nuclear physics, who will use any of my successful results that help them understand their research.

      Eventually I hope it will be picked up by other people who will come up with other clever ways to use it. This sort of thing happens all the time in science in general. In my area (nuclear physics) people wanted to understand how nuclei are made, so they built machines called particle accelerators to do their experiments. Once they were built people realised they could be used to treat cancer. This type of unexpected but fantastic outcome happens for all sorts of science research, and it’s very hard to predict.

    • Photo: Sarah Mount

      Sarah Mount answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      Great question! In two ways I think. Most of my work is really about trying to make computer software easier to write and less error prone, so hopefully that will help people who write computer programs.

      More generally though, the sort of systems I am interested in buliding use very small computers embedded into everyday object. This is sometimes called “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” computing. The idea is that rather than having a desktop computer that you have to use with a keyboard and mouse and you having to understand what the computer is doing, computers would be able to react to you. This might mean things like being able to control your computers with voice commands or it might mean that comptuers can do things for you, like vacuuming your house or ordering food to stock up your fridge!

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