• Question: What types of things do you do in your in your typical scientists day?

    Asked by chloesmith7 to Alberto, Chris, Emmanuel, Jennie, Michelle on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Michelle Taylor

      Michelle Taylor answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Every day I need to answer lots of emails – some from the research group that I work with, some from people who work in other research universities, some are from the people who are publishing my work. Then I need to catch up on the latest news – who is doing great research and where are they. I may also need to think of new projects and ideas for experiments. I usually have to look at some of the results coming in from the lab as well and think about how to write them up in an interesting way.

    • Photo: Emmanuel Amabebe

      Emmanuel Amabebe answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      A typical day for me is spent in the lab doing experiments with few hours of break checking my mails in the office.

    • Photo: Chris Whittle

      Chris Whittle answered on 23 Jun 2013:

      When I’m in the write-up area, I tend to do normal stuff you might do in any office, so I answer emails, write reports, analyse my data and do some reading and writing for my project.

      In terms of being in the lab, I try and get get any experiments I’m doing started as soon as I get in the department in the morning as these can sometimes take a while and if you sit down at your desk you end up getting distracted by emails etc.

      Every day can be different though, you may have meetings with your supervisors or you may have training to go to. I guess that’s what I like about it.

    • Photo: Alberto Lapedriza

      Alberto Lapedriza answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      My day usually starts in the fish aquarium, where we have all the zebrafish. There, I have to collect the embryos that I need for my experiments. To get the embryos, I put the adult fish in couples in small tanks for them to mate and lay eggs.

      Once I have the embryos I need, I come back to the lab and start the experiments. They usually take more than one day, and there are many times where I have to incubate my embryos with some substances for a long time. I use that time to go to the computer in the office, and analyse some previous results, or to plan the next experiments I want to do. I can also use the waiting time to read scientific articles about the research that other groups are doing in my field, to get new ideas and learn new experimental techniques that I could use in my research. When the experiment with the embryos is done, I have to go to the microscope to take pictures of the results.

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