• Question: Which of your scientific achievements are you most proud of :)

    Asked by astroaaron to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 14 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      It has to be completing my PhD. 3 1/2 years of hard work in which I wrote some software and developed a physics analysis using artificial neural networks. It was good enough to get me a research job and allow me to continue enjoying physics.

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      Hi astroaaron,

      Has to be my best publication which came from helping another scientist analyse their data. It was a bit of a lucky meeting though as I only realised I could solve the problem when chatting to them over coffee, we wouldn’t normally work together.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I think it would be measuring the shape of the electron better than anyone has ever done it before. It took a very long time (12 years), and there were quite a few times when I felt like it would never work out, so it was really satisfying to see it come together.

      It’s kinda cool to be able to claim that you’re the best in the world at something too!

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      No one finding out yet that i’m really a fraud. Shh, don’t tell.

      Science is a collective endeavour. You don’t get anywhere unless there’s a whole group working on one goal. And it progresses in tiny steps.

      Ask me in 10 years. By then I want to say, “i designed a machine that works and whose results revolutionise science”.

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      Similar to Ben really, completing my PhD felt like a real achievement after years of hard work.
      However, now I work in the funding/policy side of things, so my role is not to make scientific achievements myself but to make sure that researchers have the resources there to enable them to achieve great things. Which is tough when there’s only so much money to go around and so much amazing research, so we have to make decisions about where best to put it.

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