• Question: Do you work on your own most of the time or are you part of a team? If so, how big is the team?

    Asked by erutest to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Melissa Brereton

      Melissa Brereton answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Sometimes I work on my own but usually it is with a team of us as we always try and help eachother out. In my team there are 12 of us which is quite a large lab!

    • Photo: Jill Magee

      Jill Magee answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I work on my own when carrying out research projects, but most of my job involves a large number of people and I don’t think I could tell you an exact number. Here is a list of people which I would come into contact with on a daily basis

      – Other physicists
      – Doctors
      – Nurses
      – Technicians
      – Receptionists
      – Secretaries
      – Other health care staff such as radiographers

      Without all the above people, our jobs would be so much harder.

    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      A lot of the individual experiments I do on my own but I am part of a big research group who work on similar things so we can always help each other out. In my group there is my boss (he is a lecturer and also “principal investigator” on the projects, the there are 4 post-docs (like me!) who are people who have a PhD and wanted to do more research as their job. Then we have 7 PhD students who are all working towards their PhD. Sometimes we even have undergraduate students (people who are doing their degree at Uni) come a work with us so there are always lots of people about! I becomes like a big family and we help each other out and like to celebrate good things like experiments working and papers getting accepted in to journal for publication!

    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      This is something that’s changing, science is becoming more and more of a group effort from what I can tell.

      For me, I am essentially in control of everything myself, but there’s two others working on similar areas so we overlap sometimes. Generally when looking where to go, we have about 6 of us all deciding what I should do next. When I get patient samples I’ll start working with doctors and other clinical staff

    • Photo: Phil Rice

      Phil Rice answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I actually do the experimental work on my own, because I have not yet persuaded anyone to fund it; I talk over the results and future experiments with my colleagues. These discussions are very useful.

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