• Question: Which scientists is your role model?

    Asked by 9chadh to Antonia, Douglas, Hugh, Matt, Tom on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Antonia Hamilton

      Antonia Hamilton answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I’d say Dorothy Hodgkin – she discovered the structure of insulin.

    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      There are some pretty clever scientists in Nottingham – these guys are good to look up to.

    • Photo: Douglas Blane

      Douglas Blane answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Jocelyn Bell Burnell was my hero when I was at university. She’d discovered an amazing new kind of star, called a pulsar, when she was still a student.

      Ten years later I got the chance to work with her at the Open University. That was cool. She is clever and really nice.

      She loves explaining hard science to people in simple ways, and is phenomenal at it. She always tries to think of something else that’s like the science, but easier to understand.

      I remember one class she was talking about pressure waves in the gas clouds you get in some parts of space. She compared them with what happens when a lot of cars are driving along a country road and all of a sudden they come up behind a slow-moving tractor.

      It really helped the students understand it. Helped me a bit too.

      Meeting Jocelyn Bell and working with her is what made me realise how important it is not just to do good science, but to explain it to people.

      Just like everybody in I’m a Scientist is trying to do.

      You can find out more about Jocelyn Bell Burnell on my website here: http://www.realscience.org.uk/science-discussion-crab-pulsar-gravitational-waves.html#JocelynBell

      By the way when I first read about her she was Jocelyn Bell. Then she married a man called Burnell. But by that time she was famous among scientists as Jocelyn Bell. So she kept her own name and put her husband’s name after it.

    • Photo: Tom Hardy

      Tom Hardy answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Professor Brian Cox. He is really cool, although he is a physicist and I’m a chemist. He used to be a keyboard player in a band called D:Ream who I liked when I was a kid. Now he is a professor at the University of Manchester and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He now presents TV programmes for the BBC. I like him because he isn’t a boring, geeky scientist!

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