• Question: What is the hardest part of your job?

    Asked by anon-251659 to Ella on 27 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Ella Mercer

      Ella Mercer answered on 27 Apr 2020:

      That’s a really good question. It can be quite difficult to learn how to do some experiments properly and sometimes they won’t work and you can’t figure out why… it can mean doing the same thing over and over again and staying at work until very late. There’s lots of good things too though!

Comments

  • Photo: Gabriela

    Gabriela commented on :

    Writing grants to apply for money to do research. It is very competitive and, therefore, very time-consuming to write a good grant. Grant awarding bodies don’t have enough money to fund everyone and only about 10% of grant applications are funded. It is reality and understandable but the ability to conduct research and to pay students and staff is dependent on getting money, which makes grant writing stressful.

  • Photo: Wei

    Wei commented on :

    I am sure fellow scientists will tell you a lot about their work in applied biomedical research.

    For my work, the difficult thing is to take the evidence where it makes a difference – into the political world and translate it into polices they would make things better.

    We are witnessing this right now with the Coronavirus response all over the world. The epidemiologists are not disagreeing, but each country have chosen their own way of dealing with the outbreak. The very different approaches have lead to very different results – some countries/regions have managed to flatten the rate infection but in others, not as much.

    I think this shows us very clearly that there is a real need to see how governments use scientific knowledge in making big decisions that affect so many people.