• Question: Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?

    Asked by owen to Nordine on 3 Oct 2021.
    • Photo: Nordine Helassa

      Nordine Helassa answered on 13 Sep 2021:

      For me, watching forensic TV series when I was younger played a large part in me becoming a scientist 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: Catriona

    Catriona commented on :

    I can’t really think of a specific person or thing that inspired me to become a scientist. I just really loved science from a young age and was curious about how to body works. My BSc supervisor (and now colleague) inspired me to go down the lecturer route. He had such a positive impact on my career and I hope to do the same for my students!

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    I was inspired to become a scientist by my inquisitiveness. I always enjoyed wondering “why?” or “how?”
    Specifically, i was always intrigued why we take a paracetamol or aspirin when in pain. How does this little white pill stop my headache? There’s a lot of interesting science behind that and i chose to study pharmacology at university to find out more 🙂

  • Photo: Jacqueline

    Jacqueline commented on :

    I always liked taking things apart and looking at how things worked (aka breaking things as my mother would say). I was particularly interested in patterns which eventually lead me down the path of looking at DNA sequences. Researching the immune system was inspired by a friend who got ill from when her immune system started attacking her body instead of bacteria.

  • Photo: Andrew

    Andrew commented on :

    From age six I read the Professor Branestawm books by Norman Hunter, about an absent-minded inventor who is always blowing things up and forgetting where his spectacles are (he usually has about four pairs of glasses on his forehead), which gave me a funny idea of what science might be like, but after that for several years I was mainly into reading and writing stories and different languages. When I was a teenager, I was slightly lazy, and I realized that because I could do maths and science, it was much quicker to do my homework in those subjects than writing essays, which would leave more free time to read stories when it was done, so this influenced my choice of A-Levels. At the same time I was reading a lot of science fiction, and I started getting into popular science books about quantum theory and cosmology (my granny bought me Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time one Christmas, which made a big impression). After that I got more into maths at school, and decided to go on to study it at university, but I mainly chose options in applied maths and mathematical physics. I was lucky to have a chat with Roger Penrose (who worked with Hawking and recently got a Nobel Prize for the theory of black holes) before I left Oxford and was deciding what to study after. I went on to do a Mathematics PhD at Edinburgh, but I simultaneously took courses in Theoretical Physics, and again was really lucky to get my first lectures on quantum field theory from Peter Higgs; it was the last time he gave the course before retiring, and he got the Nobel Prize several years later when his particle was discovered at CERN. This led me into working on special waves called solitons, which behave like systems of particles, and appear in many places: on the surface of shallow water, like a canal, or the edge of a beach at low tide, and as pulses of laser light in fibre-optic cables, for instance. I’m really lucky that I’ve carried on finding interesting problems to work on, and that I get paid to do this as my job!