• Question: What's the most interesting thing you've done during your career!!

    Asked by AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA to Aaron, Abbey, Keith, Natalie, Pete on 10 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Aaron Boardley

      Aaron Boardley answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      Everyone has a different definition of ‘interesting’ – so I hope you’ll agree!

      For my career, I got to spend a week in Germany and Austria making videos about a robotics competition happening there. This was a really fun and interesting way to see what kind of work real state-of-the-art robots can do – as they can be quite different from ones in books and movies. A lot of the robots were designed to help in disaster areas like the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan – so an area that Keith would be familiar with!

      Outside of my career, I have some quite creative hobbies too. I’ve been an extra on TV (the actors who don’t say anything), a contestant on some TV game shows, and have done some theatre work where I’ve done things like cook stir-fry with the man who plays Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies. Not part of my career, but still quite interesting I think!

    • Photo: Keith Franklin

      Keith Franklin answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      In the lab the most interesting thing I did was to make a new crystal no-one had made before. Outside the lab the most interesting things I did was to organise a meeting for the Prime Minister where he made an agreement with the Japanese Government.

      I also did interesting things outside work, like appearing at the Edinburgh Festival.

    • Photo: Natalie Garrett

      Natalie Garrett answered on 13 Nov 2015:

      This is a good question, it’s got me thinking about my favourite experiences as a scientist.

      I think the most interesting thing I’ve done was when I managed to win some funding to go to Australia. I was interested in looking for malaria in blood, but I wanted to do this using lasers (because you can get cheap lasers, and it’s possible to make a small device to carry to places in Africa where there aren’t proper laboratories to diagnose the disease). I was interested specifically in looking at how we can use butterfly wings to make sensors – there are tiny structures on these wings that when you coat them in gold, gives them special properties so you can use them to detect chemicals. It’s all a bit crazy and fun, you can see my paper about it here:

      http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbio.200810057/abstract;jsessionid=A13004D58E903F32D3478C45F8D7ECFB.f01t03

      and

      http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2015/CP/C4CP04930F#!divAbstract

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