• Question: Are there aspects of your work which are done in environments other than the lab?

    Asked by Lauren to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      There’s a lot that I do in my office, from the data analysis to reading scientific papers. Unfortunately I don’t get to go on fancy field trips to tropical locations like atmospheric and environmental chemists do. Some of my work can be done from bed or the beach though, as long as I have internet access I can run my calculations.

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      At the moment most of my research is done in the lab, but I should soon be at a stage where I can do research on the roof of the University, and strict guidelines from health and safety. Once this happens then I will want to go abroad, and try and build a small setup somewhere in the sun, hopefully with a beautiful view of the sea, if possible.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      A lot of my work is done in the lab, but some of it (reading, checking results and writing up my results) is done in an office that I share with other PhD students. I also do at least one outreach activity a month where I will either help out on open days to the Uni, hold demonstrations for visiting students or go into schools and run experiments with students. Nothing as exciting as Matthew though!!

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I do an awful lot of office work; not much of my time now is spent in a lab. Summer is when I get to be in the lab, developing experiments, testing ideas, but otherwise I am now directing others – research students and so on.

      A lot of spectroscopy is simply data analysis – a single experiment lasting 36 hours provided enough data to keep me in front of a computer for a week or more! That was a crazy experiment; it was 36 hours requiring manual intervention every 45 minutes… I basically moved into the spectrometer room and snatched some sleep every 45 minutes overnight on a camp bed…My supervisor did scold me for that one though!

      A single graph in my PhD thesis, with 15 data points on it represents six months work… but they are 15 really good data points (each one representing the correlation of over 20,000 measurements) That was probably only one month in the lab and the rest was data analysis!

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      If not in the labs, I mainly work on my pc so in my office. Sometimes I do some work at home, especially during weekends.

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