• Question: Hi, What is the most beneficial thing to others about your work? TrudyScrumptious

    Asked by TrudyScrumptious to Dave, Ed, Guido, Hugh, Stef on 5 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by ajs the best.
    • Photo: Ed Rial

      Ed Rial answered on 5 Mar 2015:

      Hi Trudy 🙂

      My work does not directly cure disease or discover great secrets about the universe, but what my work DOES do is provide other scientists with a very useful tool to study the world around us.

      I work at Diamond Light Source which is a particle accelerator which uses magnets to produce very very bright light, around 10 billion times brighter than the sun. With a team I help to design and build these magnets that provide other scientists working here with X-rays that they can use to study proteins, viruses, stardust, rocks and almost anything else you can think of.

      A biochemist looking at proteins associated with a disease can begin to develop drugs to disrupt that protein and cure the disease; an engineer can look at an aircraft component and determine how it might fail so that it can be made better; a physicist can study the properties of a material to see if it can be used to make computers faster and more efficient; a historian can study an ancient papyrus scroll and use the light we produce to be able to read the scrolls without unwinding them.

      In short my work helps other scientists make great discoveries in the fields of medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry…. all areas of science; and their work benefits everyone in far too many ways to count.

    • Photo: Mariastefania De Vido

      Mariastefania De Vido answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Hello Trudy!

      I work on the development of innovative high energy lasers. Such lasers can be used in several different fields, such as energy, medicine and materials science, improving everybody’s life in many ways.

      For example, lasers like these can be one day used to build fusion energy power plants. Fusion is the process that takes place inside the Sun and provides the energy which makes life on Earth possible. It is called “fusion” because hydrogen atoms are fused together at extremely high temperatures and pressures, which are found at the centre of the Sun. Fuel required for fusion power plants can be extracted from seawater and from lithium supplies found in the earth and does not produce CO2 or long-lived radioactive waste which might contaminate the environment. This means that fusion could be an unlimited source of clean energy!

      Moreover, lasers like the ones I am developing can be used to generate X-rays and different kind of particles. Particles can be used for medical scans to detect and treat diseases like cancer, while X-rays can be used to take pictures of big objects moving at extremely high speed (like jet engines) to improve their design and check if they work properly.

    • Photo: Hugh Harvey

      Hugh Harvey answered on 8 Mar 2015:

      I hope that my work can help people survive and be cured from cancer, by finding cancer really early on before it gets too nasty.

      The most beneficial thing would be to help people survive longer, so they have more time alive to spend with their friends and family, or even cure them so they don’t have to live with cancer.

    • Photo: Dave Bond

      Dave Bond answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Hi Trudy,

      Though it may look like my answer is very much like Ed’s, in a way it is. We both work at Diamond Light source. I am only a link in a chain when it comes to being a part of science. My work involves running the Scientific Computing at Diamond, so I give others the tools they need to preform the scientific discoveries.

    • Photo: Guido Bolognesi

      Guido Bolognesi answered on 15 Mar 2015:

      Hi Trudy,

      my work has to do with studying the physics of liquids by means of lasers.
      More specifically, at the moment I am studying how lasers can be used to manipulate and deform droplets of liquids.

      The results of my research will help other scientists to make new discoveries and develop new inventions in the fields of chemistry, biology and medicine.

      For example, if I demonstrate that laser can used to make chemical reactions occurring within a single liquid droplet, the size of a human cell,
      a biologist could use my method to understand how a certain bio-chemical reaction works. She/he could use a liquid droplet as simple model of a human cell and replicate/study a certain biological process within that droplet to mimic the behaviour of a real cell. She/he could use lasers to kick off, stop, speed up or slow down that reaction at will. That would be thanks to my studies which explain why that is possible and, most importantly, how to do that.

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