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Asked by xxketurahxx to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: About.
Question: Have you always wanted to work with brains? Have you always wanted to be a scientist (even as a child)? How would you advertise your research? thanks for your time
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Nick Bradshaw answered on 16 Mar 2010:
As a child I wanted to dig up dinosaurs. Or be a magician. Or possibly an author.
I only decided that I wanted to be a scientist when I was about 15 or so. And then I only decided I wanted to study schizophrenia after university (when I was 21), although now that I am studying it, I would be quite happy to keep studying it for the rest of my career.
My work is looking at a few proteins which are known to cause schizophrenia and trying to figure out how they work. In particular I am intersted in how they work together in the cell – and how we might be able to fix them if they go wrong.
Most of the “advertising” I do of my work is to other people working in the samer area (their are at least 20 labs worldwide studying these proteins – mostly in the USA, but also in the UK, Japan and others). This is normally done by attending conferences and presenting your work – either as a lecture or on a large (A0) poster. You also publsi hyour results in scientific journals, which the other groups will read.
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Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:
Not for me, no. I was at uni before I realized brains were interesting. At the time I was studying computers because I was interested in artificial intelligence but the more I learned, the more hopeless it seemed (60 years of active research and about the best they’ve done is develop those laser bar scanners at the grocery store!). So that got me interested in real intelligence — I figured, if brains do it so effortlessly, why not learn from them?
I suppose we don’t advertise our research much as a rule. If I was going to, I’d say that my research aims to answer one question: What is so special about human brains that gives us the ability to use language when other species cannot?
In some ways, I do advertise my work by doing public engagement activities, which are always fun. I have a web page with links to some of the recent work if anyone is interested in checking them out:
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Carolyn McGettigan answered on 16 Mar 2010:
No, I didn’t always want to work with brains. When I was doing my A Levels I was interested in chemistry and genetics.
I wanted to be a forensic pathologist when I was a child, because I loved watching Silent Witness on TV. Then I realised that to be like the people in Silent Witness you have to train as a medical doctor, and I didn’t feel I would be well suited to that. Later, I realised that I could be a doctor of science instead…
Actually I ‘advertise’ my research quite often, as we need to recruit volunteers to participate in our brain imaging studies. I think it is generally very important to research how our brains work because of all the potential clinical applications for people who may sustain brain injury in an accident or after a stroke. Specifically, I think studying speech is fascinating because it’s an amazing, uniquely human skill that we use every day and I love finding out how our brains deal with it!
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Mariana Vargas answered on 16 Mar 2010:
Hi there. When I studied Biology I loved the study of the function of neurons (such as the ones that control our muscles or the brain cells). So yes, since I started my research I have worked with brains.
Since about 12 I knew I wanted to be a scientist!
To advertise my research to other scientists, once I have some results that make sense and answer a certain question, I can go and present this work at a scientific conference, or I can publish it in a scientifc journal. To advertise my work to non-scientists, I participate in events like this…
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