• Question: What is the project you are doing and how long have you been working on it/how long will it take?

    Asked by anon-260030 on 2 Oct 2020. This question was also asked by anon-259867.
    • Photo: Holly Duns

      Holly Duns answered on 2 Oct 2020:

      All my projects take between 3 and 6 months to complete. As the work i do is used by law enforcement the quicker we can get the information to them the better, although it has to be accurate and cover all areas.

      I have just finished a project on MAC address randomisation which is where the Wi-Fi MAC address used by a device is changed for each network that it connects to. As the requirement for law enforcement was high for this project we completed it within 4 months and it has already been used in a number of cases.

    • Photo: Ian Linney

      Ian Linney answered on 2 Oct 2020:

      The project I am working on has been running since April 2017 – we are trying to find molecules that will stimulate the immune system to destroy cancer cells. We have proved that the molecules work in cells and animals – we are assessing their safety prior to testing in humans

    • Photo: Tim Knapp

      Tim Knapp answered on 2 Oct 2020:

      I’m not doing any project work at the moment at have been developing on-line learning material for the courses we run on Transfusion Science. With Covid it actually speeded some things up for us.

    • Photo: James Smallcombe

      James Smallcombe answered on 2 Oct 2020:

      I am currently trying to understand why one isotope of selium (70Se) doesnt behave like all the others. We ran an experiment to make the isotope and watch the emitted gamma-rays and electrons in order to understand it’s insides. I’ve been working on this data on and off for about 3 years now. The actual experiment only took 8 days, but rearranging all the recorded signals to try and understand the actual physical event that created them is an involved process, and this experiment used a new piece of experiment so I was creating these processes for the first time as I went along.
      I’m hoping to publish my final result by the end of the year, but I said that last year before I found something weird in the results and had to redo some of the work. Fingers crossed.

    • Photo: Gaby Mayorga Adame

      Gaby Mayorga Adame answered on 2 Oct 2020:

      My current project is to look at the effect of climate change in the coastal oceans of the UK. For this, we take earth system models to force smaller models with higher resolution (7km) to get refined and hopefully more accurate results for the coastal ocean, this is called regional downscaling. Because we are predicting the future until 2100 there is lots of uncertainty so we can’t have just one model and hope it is correct. Inside we have several of them, 12 in this case, we call this an ensemble. Models have to run since the past (1980) so we have a benchmark of how good they are… But what takes the longest is to set up the models and make sure they behave correctly, and of course, analyzing the results is also a massive task… This project was funded for 4 years and is now coming to an end… Other projects described in my profile go from 6 months to 1 year, although there is always more you can do!

    • Photo: Richard Fielder

      Richard Fielder answered on 2 Oct 2020:

      I generally have lots of things being worked on at the same time. The biggest at the moment is an upgrade to our accelerator which will give us a more tightly focussed beam and brighter x-rays. Work started a few years ago, and I think the current plan is for it to be finished in 2026.

    • Photo: Sonia Rodriguez

      Sonia Rodriguez answered on 3 Oct 2020:

      I’m studying how brown fat is generated and how it can be activated in obese patients. The shortest experiments take a month, but most of them require previous trials and optimisation. I’ve been working on this project for almost a year, and we expect to keep working on it for some years.

    • Photo: Pam Harrison

      Pam Harrison answered on 7 Oct 2020:

      I work on many different projects as a specialist so only see them for a few months at a time – although may see the same one a few times to look at the active ingredient, any possible formulations and also the building blocks of the active ingredient. The drug projects themselves last for approximately 10 years from discovery to launch – although this varies a lot depending on how complicated it is and the medical need for the medicine.

    • Photo: Allyson Lister

      Allyson Lister answered on 8 Oct 2020:

      The project I’m working on is called FAIRsharing (https://fairsharing.org/), and it’s a long-term project that started about 10 years ago. We provide a website where you can find a place to share your data, and can also find the correct format for your data. Science produces lots of different types of data, from DNA sequences to the spectra of stars. If we aren’t careful how we organize that data, it can easily get lost amidst the petabytes of freely-available scientific data that’s out there!

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