• Question: Do you get to see the world in your field of work?

    Asked by captainname to Antonia, Douglas, Hugh, Matt, Tom on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      No – I went to Kenya to work in a hospital and to an orphanage in Belarus when I was at Uni. I suppose working earns you money which means I can go on some great holidays – I’ve been lots of places – Japan, Scandinavia, Hong Kong, Singapore – I’ve been very lucky.
      This week though I’m going to Spain (Valencia) to present some of my work to the European Cystic Fibrosis Conference.

    • Photo: Douglas Blane

      Douglas Blane answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Yeah I do. I’ve been sent to Austria to write about the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Finland to write about biotechnology businesses, and Houston Texas to talk to astronauts and write about them.

      First night there I was at a big dinner, sat next to guy in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. I said ‘Hi’, we got to chatting and I asked what he’d been up to recently. “I’m just back from six months on the International Space Station,” he said.

      Turned out he was astronaut Ed Lu, the first guy who’d been to the ISS and come back without losing any bone mass. This is a big problem for astronauts, caused by the weightlessness. But he’d been exercising for four hours every day to keep himself fit and his bones in good condition.

      Couple of nights later I was at a party in the top floor of the Hilton Hotel across the freeway from the Johnson Space Center. I went out to get some air (they say there’s two seasons in Houston – summer and January), onto a narrow balcony looking down on the lake and the palm trees, and there was Ed Lu again.

      This was the day after the President had announced that American astronauts were going back to the Moon and then on to Mars. Ed was looking up at the Moon, which was huge in a clear dark sky.

      “So do you fancy going there?” I asked him.

      “Yeah,” he said, with a faraway look in his eye. “That would be cool.”

    • Photo: Tom Hardy

      Tom Hardy answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I do, and I consider myself very lucky. Since starting my current job I have been to scientific conferences in Canada, Switzerland, France and Ireland.

      I travel all over the UK for various different meetings and I also do work with other scientists in countries like America and Germany and sometimes we need to visit each other. However, to save money and the environment we try to speak over the phone and via webcam as much as possible now.

    • Photo: Hugh Roderick

      Hugh Roderick answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Yes I do, well Africa anyway. I work with scientists in Uganda on making cooking banana plants (that are very important food to Africans) resistant to pests so each year we have a meeting in Uganda to discuss how the project is going. I have also been to Uganda several times to work in the laboratories and do some field work and I’ve been to South Africa and Kenya for scientific conferences where I presented my work to other scientists.

    • Photo: Antonia Hamilton

      Antonia Hamilton answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I get to travel to conferences in nice places, and I’ve worked in the USA for a couple of years. But I don’t travel to any terribly exotic places, I’m afraid.

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