• Question: What made you gain an interest specifically in your arease of expertise?

    Asked by on 3 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 3 Jan 2019:


      I’ve always had an interest in genetic disease with a view to trying to improve life for those who are affected. A few reasons: I read “In the Blood” by Steve Jones when I was at school which got me hooked on genetics; I had a friend whose father had Huntingdon’s disease when I was a teenager; and my mum worked as a physiotherapist with kids with cystic fibrosis. I think it’s really interesting and humbling that a change in a single letter (out of 3 billion letters) of DNA can cause a person to have a really serious disease. So, I started off studying genetics at University and then doing genetic research using fruit flies and worms (C. elegans) to model human genetic diseases in order to understand what the normal function of the underlying genes was. Then, I decided to do something more applied and trained as a genetic counsellor. Then I combined my scientific and clinical backgrounds to work on whole genome sequencing tests for the diagnosis of people with really rare genetic diseases. Now, I’m working on implementing this technology in the NHS!

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 4 Jan 2019:


      It was reading a book called The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. It’s 40 years old but still totally relevant to understanding evolution.

      That led me to zoology and animal behaviour at university, and from there I got into evolutionary psychology which is applying the same principles to psychology in humans and other animals.

    • Photo: Gill Harrison

      Gill Harrison answered on 4 Jan 2019:


      I didn’t know much about radiography, but spent a few days watching various different healthcare roles, particularly the allied health professions that you don’t see much about on TV. Radiography seemed so varied and active that I decided it was the job for me.

      Having spent 3 years training, I found that ultrasound was the area that I found most interesting. It gave me more patient contact, so I could speak to patients, answer questions, tell them the results of the scan and hopefully put them at ease during the examination. It is also very operator dependent, so I knew that if I did the scan I also had to interpret what I was seeing, write the report for the doctor, nurse or midwife and discuss findings with the patients.

      This link shows some of the many allied health professional roles https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/allied-health-professionals/roles-allied-health-professions

    • Photo: Laura Nolan

      Laura Nolan answered on 7 Jan 2019:


      I am a microbiologist. Microbiologists work with bacteria, fungi and viruses – so far I have worked exclusively with bacteria. I gained an interest in bacteria during microbiology classes at University. It was here that I got to learn about just how much bacteria are able to and how they do it – from producing enzymes that degrade pollutants to extending structures off of their cell surface to make bacterial nanowires that can conduct electricity, and so many other things! My first thoughts on bacteria were that bacteria were ‘simple’ forms of life. I quickly learned that this was not true at all, and in fact that they are incredibly complex. Most days in my job I marvel at this revelation and am excited to continue studying bacteria to learn more about this fascinating form of life!

    • Photo: Heather Widdows

      Heather Widdows answered on 17 Jan 2019:


      As a philosopher and ethicist I am interested in what we should do not what we can do. I have always been interested in questions about what humans being are, can be and should be and how we make the world better and fairer.

    • Photo: Omar Mahroo

      Omar Mahroo answered on 1 Feb 2019:


      I enjoyed science at school and also wanted to do something where I felt I was directly helping people, so studying medicine felt like a good idea. At medical school, I found vision, and how the eye and brain work to allow us to see, really fascinating, and I did a research project that involved recording the electrical reponses from the back of the eye (the retina) in response to light. These electrical responses tell us how the retina works, and how it can adapt to a huge range of different light intensities, which helps us understand how we see. I then trained to become an eye surgeon as it combined my interest in eyes with helping people see. In the last 5 years, I have specialised in diseases of the retina, and am also doing research in trying to understand these diseases by looking at the electrical responses from patients – a bit like what I was doing 20 years ago in medical school!

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