• Question: What do you specialize in?

    Asked by anon-198902 to Srinath, Natasha, Nana, Luisa, Gautam, Alex on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Natasha Dowey

      Natasha Dowey answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      In my current job, I specialise in looking at how the Earth has changed through time, in order to better understand where we might find oil and gas.

      I also have expertise in the study of volcanic eruptions- I did doctorate and masters degrees studying the hazards of explosive volcanism. I’ve attached a couple of cartoons that hopefully explain these things a bit more clearly!


    • Photo: Srinath Kasturirangan

      Srinath Kasturirangan answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      I am a molecular biologist specialize in discovering medicines (called biologics – meaning they are proteins which are inherent to the body) to treat diseases. A lot of recent focus has been on cancer but i have also worked extensively on Alzheimer’s disease for my PhD and on bacterial and viral infections.

    • Photo: Alexander Allen

      Alexander Allen answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I specialise in nanoscience and nanotechnology. It’s an area of physics where we are looking at the very small scale. These are molecules that are a billion times smaller than us! I have a couple of examples of different types of things I have seen. There is a complicated molecule called C60 that is made up of 60 carbon atoms shaped in exactly the same design as a football:

      And this is how they look on the surface:

      Also I have looked at some even more simple molecules that look like this (don’t worry about the colours here):

      These like to gather together in big islands like this:

      AND we can get even more detail like this:

      The main goal is to see how everything behaves and see if we can make these molecules interact with each other. The goal is that one day we can do something like 3D printing but this would be building things atom by atom! It would be a design revolution for electronics and medicine!

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