• Question: what is your greatest achievement in science?

    Asked by anon-308182 on 13 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Chris Budd

      Chris Budd answered on 13 Jan 2022:

      Working with the Met Office I helped to develop a new way to do the weather forecast. This significantly reduced the errors in making the forecast. One of the applications of this has been to give better advice to councils for gritting roads if there is going to be a chance of ice on the roads. Hopefully this makes the roads safer and saves lives in the process. I have also been working very hard in a team of mathematicians and other scientists since lock down. We do modelling work to test the safety of different measures to combat Covid. I hope that this has made our schools, universities, shops and trains safer. We even did the safety calculations for the Edinburgh Fringe and for recent carol services. If my work has saved even one life then that is an achievement to be proud of.

    • Photo: Jonny Coates

      Jonny Coates answered on 13 Jan 2022:

      My biggest achievement was probably the COVID work we’ve done over the past two years. I’m still early in my career so publishing as the senior author was amazing – and it was the first bit of work that was truely mine. But it isn’t really my achievement, the credit really does go to the team involved and I’m so thankful for the attention that the work has been given.

      I’d also say still being in academia is a huge achievement – it can be a very difficult career path and I’ve experienced bullying from a boss and senior management which resulted in an extremely difficult two years.

    • Photo: Danielle Nader

      Danielle Nader answered on 13 Jan 2022:

      I think my biggest achievement is seeing my practical work in the lab go on to actually make a difference in real time in our world today. Our work on COVID19 has been published in several journals, presented at many international conferences, and we have made numerous new connections with other scientists that have expanded my theories and understanding of COVID19.

    • Photo: Laura Durrant

      Laura Durrant answered on 13 Jan 2022:

      Helping with essential sequencing of COVID-19 genomes. When people test positive, we receive their samples and use high-tech machines to decode viral DNA. We use this data to track the virus around the UK, how fast it spreads and how it is changing over time. Other researchers can use this data to further study COVID-19, while pharmaceutical companies can use it to design medicines and vaccines.

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 14 Jan 2022:

      Hi Wills,
      In my PhD I discovered a new pathway by which pox viruses get around the cellular immune defense.. It is still not published in a ‘real’ journal, only as a pre-print, but figuring out this whole pathway by myself over the course of three years was probably my biggest accomplishment 🙂

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