• Question: What is the most complicated place or thing you you have worked in

    Asked by anon-177297 to Urslaan, Nicola, Helen, Daniel, Becky, Andrew on 16 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Andrew Singer

      Andrew Singer answered on 16 Jun 2018:

      I currently work in the area of antimicrobial resistance in the environment. I try to understand how human activity has made the problem of drug-resistant infections worse. For example, when you have an infection, your doctor might prescribe an antibiotic to kill the microbe that has infected you. These antibiotics are not working as well as they used to, which is because the bacteria have become resistant to the drugs. Understanding WHY the drugs aren’t working and how this happens is EXTREMELY complicated–but in a wonderful way, as it forces you to understand more and more about how the world works. The key is to keep your mind open to new information and always be open to having your mind changed.

    • Photo: Becky Thomas

      Becky Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2018:

      Great question. My research involves working with people and animals and that can get very complicated! I’ve done lots of research into the effects that pet cat predation has on wildlife, but this is complicated for many reasons (it’s hard to know what animals the cats are killing as they don’t always bring them home as ‘presents’, we don’t know if those animals would have died naturally anyway because they were sick or old, etc.). There are over 10million pet cats in the UK alone, and they are killing over 180 animals a year. As many wildlife species are under threat for so many reasons (habitat loss, pollution etc.), it’s very complicated to figure out what impact this level of predation is actually having. Plus it’s even more complicated, because cats are people’s pets… although some people don’t like them hunting, they love them and don’t want to hear that they might be reducing bird populations.

    • Photo: Helen Littler

      Helen Littler answered on 17 Jun 2018:

      The science/maths I do is simple in comparison to the others but I find running mathematical simulations really hard work especially when they don’t output what I was hoping for!

    • Photo: Daniel Marsh

      Daniel Marsh answered on 18 Jun 2018:

      I have to use software programmes to extract the answers to complicated questions from huge databases to give us better understanding about air pollution and sometimes it is very difficult to write the code and get it right!

    • Photo: Urslaan Chohan

      Urslaan Chohan answered on 18 Jun 2018:

      It’d be writing papers during my PhD. It was really difficult to do that, as it took a lot of refinements and revisions to get the papers completed. But it’s been a wonderful learning experience!

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