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Asked by tezzahh to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by thedolphinoflife, student123.
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Claire Brockett answered on 16 Jun 2014:
The best project I’ve worked on is the one I’m doing now – looking at different treatments for the ankle. It’s a really great project – I get to work with doctors, biologists, medical physicists, and sometimes patients. I’m learning new things too, which makes everything a bit more interesting. It’s really worthwhile as there are a lot of patients out there with ankle problems and the current treatments aren’t always successful, so knowing what I do might make a real difference to someone else is really inspiring.
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Neil Dhir answered on 16 Jun 2014:
During my undergraduate degree I was fortunate enough to get to work on a conceptual electrical car, who’s soul purpose was to break the land-speed record for electrical vehicles. No mean feat it turns out, and the amount of calculation required just to remove a single gram was sometimes ridiculous, but in the end worth it.
It is an interesting project in the sense that it has been running in my old department for years, and each year in an upgrade of the previous one, meaning that eventually the design really ought to converge on something really cool which, I hear, they are considering actually building (though that will not be cheap, but imagine the fun you could have with it).
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Alex Lyness answered on 16 Jun 2014:
Hey tezzahh,
That is an easy question. Just like Claire, I find that the best project I work on is the one I am doing now or next. With every project I do I take on more responsibility and get to work with cleverer people that I can continue to learn from and develop every day.
My main project at the moment aims to develop an injection device for a cell therapy that will be used in a clinical trial next year to help patients who suffer from a (currently) incurable genetic skin disease.
It is exciting to be at the forefront of new treatments that come from the very latest understanding in engineering, science and medicine. I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet some of the patients who the device is going to be for and discuss how the disease they have affects their lives. Those conversations help spur me on when things get difficult. Hopefully the device and cell therapy will work and the lives of those I’ve met can be made better that would truly make it the best project I’ve worked on.
Until the next one…
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Kate Niehaus answered on 16 Jun 2014:
For me, the best projects I’ve worked on are a combination of the people I’m working with and the sense that what we’re doing is important and necessary work. Of course, what you see as “important and necessary” varies by person.
One project that comes to mind is from my master’s degree when I was working with a team of other students to design a way to diagnose neonatal jaundice in rural areas of India. Our group of five worked really well together, we all felt that this was a problem worth spending time on, and there were challenging engineering and feasibility problems to think about. To me, that made it a lot of fun!
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Marcus Johns answered on 17 Jun 2014:
I think my favourite project that I’ve worked on was a field trial at a petrol station looking at using carbon to absorb petrol and other hydrocarbons from contaminated soil. The idea itself wasn’t new, but the company I worked for had developed a cylinder of carbon that required much less energy to pump the gases from the soil through the system compared to other carbon technologies. It was also possible to recover the chemicals from the carbon afterwards – most of the time the carbon is subjected to very high temperatures, effectively burning everything off.
I enjoyed it because it allowed me to see something that I’d worked on in action in a real-life situation. (It also meant that I could get up at 10am rather than 6am – I like my lie-ins!)
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