• Question: What have you recently been doing in your job, focusing on and any experiment?

    Asked by jbromham to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 17 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Most recently I’ve been writing my confirmation report, which is a document that I need to submit after the first year of my PhD in order to be able to carry on to the 2nd and 3rd years.

      I also set up an experiment before I came to Greece that is looking at trying to create a chemical that combines the chemical groups of cellulose and chitosan together. I’m doing this by feeding the basic chemicals to a bacteria that feeds off them and creates a fibre as a by-product. Fingers crossed that when I get back I’ll have something to investigate!

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      hi jbromham
      Last week I was doing quite a bit of exam marking, as our final year students have been taking exams in manufacturing processes! I had 140 exam papers to mark. They’re all done now though, so I can focus back on the research.
      One of my students is off to her first conference next week, so I’ve been helping her design the poster that will explain her research. She’s also trying her first experimental tests on ankle replacements. We have a special machine which makes the ankle replacement ‘walk’ (theres a picture in my profile page). Getting the machine to run properly can be quite fiddly so we’ve taken a while to sort that out.
      I’m also working over at the hospital with some other researchers to assess movement in the ankle when you do different activities – if we can measure it at the hospital, we can then try to build experiments that are able to do the same thing so we can test different treatments. I’ll be there later this week.

    • Photo: Kate Niehaus

      Kate Niehaus answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      This week I’ve been looking at a bunch of new data I’ve just received from the hospital. This means that I’ve been making lots of graphs and making sure that there are no mistakes or outliers in the dataset.

      I’m also working on making a poster for a conference that is coming up, which will explain some of the work I’ve done recently on finding different subtypes of patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Hey jbromham,

      My major experiment over the past fortnight has been using high speed cameras (running at 40,000 frames per second!) to view components working in a prototype device I’m developing.

      For this I have to plan the study and design the experiments, I also have to set up the equipment and know how to use it and the software and then I have to do lots of video and data analysis to understand how fast everything inside the device is travelling.

      P.S. A bit of trivia for you… the high speed camera I am using was also used to test the Brazuca World Cup football that they are using over in Brazil at the moment!

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