• Question: What are you working on at the moment?

    Asked by supergirl786 to Jon, Daniel, Louise, Sharon, Zoe on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by dino88, kg138, poison, olirara.
    • Photo: Jon Copley

      Jon Copley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Right now (this morning!) I’m writing up the results from our expeditions earlier this year, when we investigated undersea volcanoes around Antarctica, and explored an ocean trench in the Caribbean called the Cayman Trough.

      Part of that involves analysing the video from our underwater vehicles, so we have a map of what lives where at the underwater volcanoes, and examining the new species that we have found, so that we can prepare a “formal” scientific description of them, and see where they fit in the web of life in the oceans (which will help us better understand that web of life). I have two PhD students helping me with that work – Leigh and Verity – and they’re doing a great job. The science we do is very much a team effort, and I’m lucky to have a superb team.

      At the same time, I’m also having meetings to plan our expeditions next year, to make sure all the equipment that we need will be loaded onto the ship in time. And trying to raise funding for another expedition to a part of the world that no-one has been to before – we have some funding from National Geographic, who would like to make a TV documentary of the expedition, but we still need to raise more so we can hire the ship that we need.

    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      I am working on 2 things. The first, I am trying to work out ways of making stem cells from an egg, rather than an embryo. This is very tricky and in the 4 years I’ve been doing it, i’ve managed to make 3 stem cell lines, which does not seem like a lot, but it’s pretty good going!

      The other thing I am working on, is I am trying to investigate if a protein found in your eye, can stop cancer cells from growing and spreading around the body. It seems to be able to do it in the lab, on my stem cells and on my breast cancer cells so next I want to see if it works on different types of cancer cells and then try and work out what is happening to the cells!

    • Photo: Louise Dash

      Louise Dash answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      At the moment I’m investigating how vibrations interact with electricity in tiny molecules connected to leads. The calculations we do are very long and complicated, some of them have taken over a month to run our code! We’re trying to find out which bits we can leave out of our calculations, to make them quicker, and still come up with the right answer.

      Another big thing I’m working on is a grant proposal – we need more money to carry on doing our work, which means every so often we have to spend quite a time preparing and submitting a detailed plan of what we’d like to do next to our funding council – ours is called the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Only a small minority of applications get accepted, so it needs to be really good (and some luck is useful too!).

    • Photo: Zoe Duck

      Zoe Duck answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      At the moment I am trying to work out how to extract some proteins from the bacteria I work with- Yersinia pestis. i am trying to find out if they can work outside the cell or not and if not, what else to they do they need to work.

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