• Question: how have you made an impact in science, is that what made you want to carry on further?

    Asked by mimi to Greg, Jen, Laura, Mobeen, Paul on 11 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by megan.
    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      I wouldn’t say I have had a significant impact (yet!), but I am working on it! I think success is obviously a good motivator but also I think knowing that the work you are doing is valuable and that all of us here do work that helps benefit peoples lives is motivation enough.

    • Photo: Greg Melia

      Greg Melia answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      A good way of seeing if you’ve had an impact is to look at whether people are citing your work. Scientists write up their work and publish it as papers in scientific journals, or at conferences. When we do this, we cite all the people whose work ours depends on, in a list of references at the end of our paper, so that everyone can see where we got our ideas. If you look up my name on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), most of my papers have several people citing them, so I know that other scientists are using my work and taking it further.

    • Photo: Laura Haworth

      Laura Haworth answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      I don’t think I have made much of an impact in science yet. May be one day though. What motivates me is if a patient walks out of my room highly satisfied 🙂

    • Photo: Jen Lowe

      Jen Lowe answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      The biggest impact is probably contributing to the effective routine care of hundreds of patients each year which will have a big impact on each individual’s life. I like doing that. In my research when I was studying for my Masters I did contribute to looking at the radiation doses from sources that were put into hearts to treat atherosclerosis. I wrote some code to help analyse nuclear medicine images and I believe that’s still in use in our hospital now. But lots of scientific improvements are small changes that are brought about but lots of little steps by lots of individuals. There are millions of scientists but only a few get a Nobel prize 🙂

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