• Question: What made you want to become a scientist?

    Asked by anon-188256 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Shanti Shanker

      Shanti Shanker answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      I wanted to work in Neuropsychology and reading and researching was something that came naturally to me. So being a scientist happened as I enjoy the role.

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      Hi, thanks for the question. I answered a similar question earlier so my answer is still the same! A combination of things made me want to become a scientist. A big one is that I am an enormous geek (not a bad thing). Watching a lot of science fiction when I was growing up, like Star Trek, made me really want to do some kind of science. Another reason is my dad, who is also a scientist (he is a zoologist who looks at animals), is someone I really look up to and he has always encouraged my scientific pursuits. Another big reason is having the privilege of a good education, I am very lucky. I have been given lots of opportunities to pursue my interests, and as a result it has led me naturally to where I am now.

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 10 Nov 2018:

      I wanted to study psychology since I was 14!!! To be fair I didn’t know if I’d be the kind of psychologist that would become a scientist- that came much later, at the end of my undergrad. For the final year of undergrad we get to do our own mini project, just to get a little taste of what being a scientist would be like. I had so much fun with my project and it made me see how scientific research can actually make a difference and as the scientist you get to have a front seat to seeing that change happen! I loved that so much I got hooked to the idea of being a scientist!!!!

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Hi,

      I started studying psychology so I can understand what controls us as people. Since then, I was always interested in how we process information in the busy, complex, multisensory environments. So that’s forever motivated my research – I started from studying how what we know about the way we attend and learn differs when we use simple, typically used stimuli, like coloured shapes to stimuli that carry emotional information, like fearful faces or threatening words. From there I went to another “salient” category of stimuli – those engaging multiple senses at once – multisensory stimuli.

      So the goal of my research right now is to use what we know about the mind and the brain and the tools of neuroimaging to better understand and improve people’s functioning in real environments. That is, thge aim of the research of mine and my group is to better understand the brain and cognitive mechanisms allowing us to see and interact in real-world environments, such as the classroom, high-street or at home. Filling out these lacks in knowledge is probably the most important for supporting how children learn every day as well as in rehabilitation of different disorders – from kids not seeing very well (like when they have a “lazy eye” to kids having problem with learning or older adults who have problems with their memory. To help these people, I am at the same time interested in how we can use technology – tablets, virtual reality, even robots – to make learning – and rehabilitation (often very boring and very long!) more fun and engaging and more adjustable to when children / patients are ready to do all this “learning”.
      So to me these are very exciting times, because we are finally crossing into studying “problems” (like “learning”) from all possible points of view at the same time – what we know about the mind (psychology), about the brain (neuroscience and brain imaging), the potential of technology (engineering and educational psychology) and important of health (medicine).

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