• Question: How long does each project take you to complete? Do you feel a lot of pressure?

    Asked by Aillam to Dominic, Maedeh, Matthew, Matt, Monica on 4 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Dominic Eggbeer

      Dominic Eggbeer answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      By their nature, most cases I and my team deal with are time-sensitive. If you’re scraping somebody up after an accident or helping to plan the removal of disease, this needs to be done over a matter of days or sometimes weeks. Some projects need longer to plan, but even then, it’s usually months. Big research projects are run over years.

    • Photo: Monica Rozeik

      Monica Rozeik answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      I work at the university so the time pressure isn’t as high as it is in other workplaces. Research projects at university, like my work on heart valves, can take a few years because they are new projects which sometimes start from scratch and need a lot of time to develop properly.

      During this time, we do a lot of reading to stay up to date with the latest scientific work, run experiments and report interesting bits of our work to people.

    • Photo: Maedeh Borhani

      Maedeh Borhani answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      Most research projects at university, can take a few years to complete. during these years, you need to start from scratch by reading and research the literature, developing your plan of action, recruiting volunteers/patients, setting up the experiment, collecting data, analysing data and writing reports. Sometimes I feel a lot of pressure as you need to handle other things that only research such as teaching, supervising students, presenting at seminars or conferences and submitting papers for publication.

    • Photo: Matthew Oldfield

      Matthew Oldfield answered on 5 Mar 2016:

      Some projects I work on take about a year working with students. The steerable needle project has been running for eight years already and will run for at least four more.

      Medical projects often take a very long time as all risk must be taken out of the end-product.

      If you think of designing an experiment or a new component for a piece of equipment though, that may only last a week or two.

      Normally I have several bits of work going on at the same time. Some, like designing a new simulation, only take days whereas others, investigating a new experimental setup for example, take months or even years.

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