• Question: what do you do for your work

    Asked by jacinta to laurenceharwood, Akram, David, Gill, Jack on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by sophielovescaroluslinnaeus, gherkinboy.
    • Photo: Laurence Harwood

      Laurence Harwood answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Hi Jacinta. I teach Chemistry at the University of Reading and carry out research in areas such as medicinal chemistry, agricultural chemistry and nuclear decontamination. I also have a spin-out company called TechnoPep (spot the advertising – URL: http://www.technopep.com/) that makes proteins and I am also the governor of a school – in other words, I help run the school. I also do other outreach actiites like giving chemistry demonstration lectures and “I’m a Scientist”. I’m kept pretty busy.

    • Photo: Akram Alomainy

      Akram Alomainy answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      I am a Lecturer who is passionate about teaching and learning and also researching the latest techniques to make our wireless life a better experience 🙂

      Finding the best way for signals to get from one point to another, how they behave around humans and how to make them use less power for a greener future are few of my daily work activities.

      I enjoy communicating the latest research in science and engineering to young people and also the general public and I am an active communicator who goes around schools and events to promote science and engineering (geek squad on the road ;)).

      I am also the Senior Tutor in my department so I look after Master students, their teaching and learning issues and if they have any problems with their learning environment. In addition, I get people from industry to talk to students and staff for more interesting project as per my role Industrial Strategy Coordinator!

      So some dull routine stuff but definitely interesting aspects like ‘I’m a scientist’ 😀 I have more info here /energym12-zone/profile/akramalomainy

    • Photo: Gill Menzies

      Gill Menzies answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      I’m a lecturer also. I teach low carbon building design and management at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. I spend a lot of time doing research into good building management, low energy and carbon government policies, life cycle assessment (to story of products from raw materials to disposal) and building modelling (building software models of buildings and see how much energy they use and carbon they emit – it helps designers to improve buidlings for the future). All my research then goes into teaching students (the designers of the future – that’s you in a few years time) 🙂

    • Photo: Jack Snape

      Jack Snape answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      I’m a PhD student studying fusion energy: it powers the stars and hopefully it will power our lives in the future.

      Fusion happens when atoms collide and stick together, releasing a lot of energy in the process. This is going on in the Sun and other stars all the time, but we’re trying to harness the energy to make a power station here on earth.

      I work in a big office at the York Plasma Institute at the University of York with other PhD students who also study plasmas – mostly for fusion but also for other things like medical applications or simulating big plasma explosions in outer space.

      I spend most days writing computer code to do maths and statistics on data from the tokamak. We can measure lots of different properties of the plasma like the temperature, the magnetic field, the speed of plasma flow and the density of particles and they all tell us how close we are to getting fusion to work. 🙂

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