• Question: What will you do with your project to make the world a better place?

    Asked by jessamy to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Thanasis, Sandra on 10 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      I focus on diseases which cause a lot of problems for people living in the countryside in some of the poorest countries in the world. They have very little money and rely on being able to grow vegetables and raise a few cows or goats. When they get these diseases they can make the person too ill to work (or even kill them). If the animals get the diseases they can also be very unwell, or even die.

      My work should give us lots of information about who gets these diseases and why. I want to work with the Governments in the countries I am working in to improve the way that they try to prevent or control the diseases. If we can do a good job of this, then less people and animals will get the diseases – there will be more work going on, more food and a bit more money.

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      A lot of the work that I do is trying to understand what factors mean that animals go extinct, if I can use information from the whole of history of life on earth, which includes some periods (like 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs went extinct) where almost all the life on earth was wiped out in a mass extinction. By understanding that, I can pass the information on to conservation scientists today and they can use it to stop as many animals as they can from going extinct now in the present.

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      My work has two roles, one of them is to screen a healthy population of women to detect abnormal, or pre-cancerous cells to prevent those women from potentially going on to develop cervical cancer. And so the work I do is about saving lives of women, and also enabling them to retain their fertility so they can have children if they wish to.

      But mostly it is to prevent women potentially dying of cervical cancer.

      If preventing women from dying of cancer doesn’t make the world a better place, I don’t know what does 🙂

Comments