• Question: What are your favourite aspects of the practical work you are involved in?

    Asked by snacks to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 18 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Anne Seawright

      Anne Seawright answered on 18 Mar 2010:


      My favourite part is the recruitment of cases through the behaviour clinic because I get to have interaction with the dogs and their owners and also hopefully help them!

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 18 Mar 2010:


      Hi Snacks. The technique I used is called “electrophysiology” and one aspect that I love about it is that I get to see the results (of an individual experiment) on the same day I start it! (in many other techniques you need to wait for days or weeks to see the results).
      One more thing I love is that I get to play with a lot of cables, soldering guns, and electrical equipment, although I know that’s kind of geeky.
      Oh and another thing I like is that there are nice gaps bettween preparing my cells and recording them so I often have a chance to go out for lunch! 🙂

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 18 Mar 2010:


      Ooh tricky question. I guess probably whatever the newset thing I am working on is. I have beed doing a lot of microscope work the last couple of months which has got a bit tedious (not to mention sore on the eyes). However I have just started a new project which is using “physics” techniques to study a schziophrenia-related protein (e.g. shining tight beams of light at it to see how it scatters of it – which gives us some information about the shape of the protein). I’m quite enjoying this, as it is unlike any of the work I have done previously.

      But to be quite honest my favourite experiments are any that work!

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 18 Mar 2010:


      For me it’s data analyses. Looking at data is the most exciting part because you spend so much time designing new experiments and then collecting the data, once you get to look at it you start to see whether all your efforts worked or not. I must say, it’s pretty unusual to run an experiment and get the results you expected. In most cases, it’s far more complicated and it takes a while of looking at the data, running extra analyses and thinking about it critically before it starts to make sense. At that point, it normally leads to new hypotheses that need to be tested in new experiments. So data analysis is definitely my favorite day-to-day thing to do.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 18 Mar 2010:


      My practical work involves putting people in the MRI scanner and running experiments with them where they listen to speech or speak out loud, or a bit of both! I like the routine of having a really practical day at the scanner – it’s reasonably simple to run the experiments and it’s exciting to know that we’re collecting lots of juicy new data to analyse! I also enjoy meeting the people we scan and finding out what motivated them to take part and what they thought of my experiment. And of course it’s always fun looking at people’s brains – that won’t ever stop being amazing for me.

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