• Question: How does your work make a difference?

    Asked by rebel to Angeline, Catherine, Luke, Philip, Shona on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Shona Whittam

      Shona Whittam answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      My work improves the lives of people with cancer.

    • Photo: Angeline Burrell

      Angeline Burrell answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      My work helps us understand our environment better. This improves our ability to communicate (especially with satellites) and travel. For example, sometimes it’s safe to fly an airplane over the Arctic, which shortens the route for travel between Europe and Canada. But sometimes the sun is active and taking this route would expose everyone to too much radiation.

    • Photo: Philip Moriarty

      Philip Moriarty answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      A major part of my work is teaching and lecturing. This makes a difference because I’m educating the next generation of scientists (and feel immensely privileged to be in a position to do this).

      Our research focuses on the manipulation of matter at the atomic level — i.e. the modification of materials at the level of their most fundamental building blocks. This makes a difference by extending our ability to control the material world around us (and, hopefully, in the long term to enable entirely new approaches to the more energy efficient production of materials).

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