• Question: What type of science do you study?

    Asked by mrawesomesauce to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      I’m an epidemiologist, which means I study diseases in populations. So we gather information about how many people have a disease and how many don’t, plus lots of other information like where they live, how old they are etc and then we use statistics to try and find out what makes people more likely to become infected with the disease.

      I focus on spatial things – so I look at whether the environment (things like rainfall, temperature, forests, rivers, elevation) makes any difference to how many people catch the disease. For example, people may be more likely to catch some particular diseases if they live in a tropical country, with a lot of rainfall, and live close to a river or lake.

      Most people have not heard of epidemiology before, and a lot of people think it is to do with the skin (because the skin is called the epidermis), but it actually has nothing to do with that! It is more to do with epidemics of disease.

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      I study palaeontology (which just means studying ancient life – so fossils), and evolution. A lot of people think that palaeontology is just digging up fossils of dinosaurs (like Ross from the TV show Friends). Dinosaurs are very cool obviously, but there are loads of other amazing fossils of extinct creatures (99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct so there is a lot to choose from) that paleontologists study. As well as that we try to work out how evolution happens over really long timescales, like billions or millions of years.

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      I am a biomedical scientist in cellular pathology. Cellular pathology is the branch of medicine that deals with disease, and how the changes in the body’s tissues, cells and organs change because of disease. And we can look at the cells under the microscope and see what disease is making a patient sick, or why they died.

      Mostly, we look at cancerous cells.

      It is a hospital lab I work in, and a lot of our work comes from patients in the hospital, but also samples get sent in by the GP.

      Most people don’t know about biomedical scientists and think it’s the ward doctors who diagnose disease…(it’s not, it’s pathology lab who do that)

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