• Question: why did you decide to become a scientist?

    Asked by anon-188638 to Warren, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 7 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      I’l be totally honest- at first I just kinda fell into it.
      I decided to study psychology at about 14 but I never imagined being a full on scientist and doing research!
      It was only after my undergrad finished that I was a bit confused about what to do next. A lot of advice I got was to go the scientist route and do some research because it could give me lots of career options in the future. And the rest was history!
      So why I decided to do it started off with it being a good career decision but I would say now the reason I’ve stuck with it is that I’ve discovered the thrill of being able to discover something new or solve a problem people are struggling to fix. It feels amazing!

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      Thanks for your question. To be honest, like Nadine, I kind of fell into my particular area (sleep and memory research). I have been lucky enough in my life to have had a good education, and part of that education was being able to choose what I wanted to learn the longer I was in it. At various points I became more specialized, following what I found most interesting at the time. Eventually that led me to this area!

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Hi,

      Since I started studying psychology (so I can understand what controls us as people), 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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