• Question: do you have other members contributing to your work / investigation / eperiment

    Asked by ilovescience to Paul, MarthaNari, Jonny, Hannah, Alison on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      All PhD students have at least one academic supervisor; this is someone (usually a University lecturer) who gives you advice on how to best do your experiments. If a project is being done in partnership with a company, then the student might have an industrial supervisor as well, who would be somebody who works for the company in a similar area to the project. The industrial supervisor can also give advice on how best to do the experiments. I have two academic supervisors, and two industrial supervisors. As for doing the experiments themselves, that’s all down to me!

    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I have a supervisor like Paul said. I also have another research student who sometimes works on the same stuff as me. We’re currently writing a computer program together for our research.

    • Photo: Alison Whitaker

      Alison Whitaker answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Yes, I work as part of a project team. There is another scientist that works with me, and we work with a software development team too. Then we have the people who are impacted by our work, they contribute their thoughts and problems (a lot!) and we (the scientists) have to interpret what they are saying and design new software to address their questions and problems.

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Yes, absolutely! The experiments I do would be pretty much impossible to do alone. There are just too many skills involved – genetics, surgery, animal training, programming, maths, graphics, writing… For one person to be brilliant at all of those, and have the time to do all of them, would be a miracle. And that’s just one experiment. So we’re a group of roughly 5-7 people that work together regularly.
      Even if it wasn’t for the different skills, it’s really important to get different people’s views and ideas about how to do a project. Especially with new experiments, you really need that sanity check to make sure you’re going for the best possible solution at the time.
      I also work with colleagues who do very different experiments (for example interviews with people or computer simulations) but on similar questions (e.g. how does the brain change when we pay attention to something?). It’s really useful to compare notes and see if we come across the same results independently.

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