• Question: did any one encourage you/inspire you to be a scientist?

    Asked by charlotteharrison to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Yes definitely, I had some briliant teachers on Natural Science throghout school. Although I never met a researcher until university; my favourite teacher at university, Myrna, taught me to do my first experiments and encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to do a Masters in Cambridge, and it worked! I even stayed for a PhD.

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      That’s a really good question. Lots of people were encouraging at different points in my life. When I was a kid, I loved sci-fi and that encouraged me to as lots of questions. And my parents were always supportive about asking questions and encouraged me to find my own answers when possible. Later, I had a supportive PhD supervisor and a really great group of science-wanna-be friends who inspired me to keep going on the many occasions when I seriously thought about stopping. But probably the people who most encouraged me were my mentors at Oxford and my wife. Without them, I probably would have given up science about 10 years ago and gone back to industry. They taught me that there are some wonderful people in the field who I really respect both as scientists and as people and their example is what I try to emulate.

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      My biology teacher, Mr O’Donnell went a long way towards getting me intersted in biology. Also my grandad who did a lot of work on radiation therapy for cancer in the 50s an 60s.

      Ultimately though it just felt like the rigth path to go down.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      My parents were always very encouraging, and supported me in my studies all the way through, but neither of them is a scientist nor had any particularly strong feelings about what I should study. My science teachers at school weren’t particularly inspiring (sorry guys!), but I do remember that one of them was called ‘Dr’ and it was only then that I realised you could actually be a ‘doctor of science’. I suppose that got me curious about careers in research. When I was doing my A Levels I read New Scientist a lot and got quite excited about developments in genetics research at that time.

      After I graduated from university I saw my current boss give a talk about her neuroimaging work, and I was just so impressed with her research and her confidence that I got in touch about doing a PhD with her at UCL. I’m still in the same lab, and I am very thankful for the support she has given me over the years.

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