• Question: have you done anything life changing?

    Asked by cookie monster to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I have done things that have changed my life but, so far, I don’t think that my research has changed the world yet! But science is quite hard and I think you need a long career to make a real difference and I am just at the start!

      I think that taking a gap year and getting married are the two things that changed my life the most.

      What do you think changed your life the most?

    • Photo: Tora Smulders-Srinivasan

      Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      It depends on what you mean.

      I’ve done things that have changed my own life — meeting my husband & getting him to go out with me when I was at university — as well as having my children — getting going on my career in science, etc.

      I think some of the work that I have done & contributed to has changed the way scientists think about certain very specific fields of science — but nothing that anyone not in that area will have heard of!

      Is there something you had in mind?

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Hi there,
      I have done many things that have changed my own life – but having a massive influence on other peoples lives, thoughts and opinions is much harder to measure. Doing thinks like this can help – if, though doing I am a Scientist encourages some students to take up research in the future then that can be life changing!
      The way scientists measure the influence they have on their discipline or field is counting the number of times somebody else have used their work through citations in books and research papers. I have 1150 citations now – that means my work has been used in over 1000 other books or papers – which is not too bad for my area of science.

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