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Asked by static to Maria, Laurel, Ceri-Wyn, Bridget, Betul on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research. This question was also asked by ladyj, xladytinksx.
Question: what makes your research differ from others/what makes your work stand out?
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Maria Pawlowska answered on 13 Jun 2010:
I analyze both the geochemistry of very old rocks as well as the fossils and try to put it all together to see what the world was like a billion years ago.
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Betul Arslan answered on 14 Jun 2010:
I do not think that anybody in the world is actually resurrecting billions of years old proteins to test how they’d look like now! 🙂
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Bridget Waller answered on 14 Jun 2010:
Well, scientists tend to become very specialised. So, you start studying something very broadly (in my case – biology), and then over the years of further study you gradually home in on very specific areas. So now, I am one of only a handful of people in the world who study the evolution of facial expression. So…that makes it different to other scientists (but not necessarily better!). One thing that makes my work quite appealing (I think) is that people tend to be very interested in other animals, and so there are lots of ways to communicate the science to the community.
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Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 14 Jun 2010:
There are only a few people in the world looking at the earliest animal fossils so I guess my research is just different by default since everyone else is off studying black holes or cancer therapies or nanotechnology!
However, I do think that I’m in a unique position to look at early animal evolution since the fossils I work on could potentially help us to answer questions such as “did the earliest animals produce larvae or did they develop directly like humans?- what is the ancestral condition for all animals? or “Where the first animals bilaterally symmetrical like humans or where they more like corals and jellyfish with much more simplistic body plans?”
These are wide reaching questions that go the farthest back in time that can be reached in terms of animal evolution (although you could go back even further to the roots of Life itself!) and it’s these BIG questions that make my work stand out 😉
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Laurel Fogarty answered on 14 Jun 2010:
My research is kind of unique because I do a combination of maths and biology. I look at an evolutionary system and distill it down to the essentials of what makes the system work. Then I describe what is happening in mathematical equations. When I solve the equations I can see exactly what the system will do in certain circumstances, like when there is a lot of competition between species or the environment the animals live in changes a lot. I can then test my maths using real animals and find out if they behave the way I predicted.
This is a unique way to study behaviour, it means that my research in the lab is focused- I know what I should be looking for, it also means that what I do has a very solid foundation. A basis in maths makes the research I do that much stronger.
Comments
static commented on :
why do they say humans are similar to dat of an ape but yet our internal organs maybe similar to a pigs
Bridget commented on :
That is a good question! Pigs are indeed very similar, and therefore there is lots of reseaerch looking into organ development for use with humans. Primates might be even more suitable, but there are (perhaps) bigger ethical questions as many primates are endangered, whereas pigs are not. Good question.