• Question: What is your greatest achievement surrounding your subject, or what achievements are you working towards?

    Asked by anon-201693 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201906, anon-201301, anon-201664, anon-201761.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I think my thesis, the long report I write about all the research I’ve done and what it means to the wider world, will be my greatest achievement when I get round to writing it

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Along with a colleague, I have discovered that a key component in a nuclear fusion reactor is likely to fail within a few months of service. These results will be published shortly and this is a great achievement as it means that we have forseen important faults with reactor design before the reactor has been built!

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I led the development of a tool for data analyses in particle physics, which has become the LHC’s standard way of preserving analysis logic, and also drove big changes in how modern particle physicists think about measurement. This will make the LHC legacy a lot more powerful, so I’m really proud of what we did there: for years we were swimming against the tide, but we believed in what we were doing, and the message got through in the end. I also used this to design some of the main simulations used at the LHC, so a *big* fraction of the trillions of simulated events that we’ve used for everything from Higgs boson to supersymmetry to black-hole searches have my stamp on them!

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      I’m new to science research, so I don’t have any great achievements I can shout about yet.
      In terms of achievements I’m working towards, I’ll be contributing to making the most precise measurement ever of some particle physics processes. Not only will this work help us understand these and other similar processes, but it could give us hints of where to look for new physics that’s currently hiding in the dark…

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I’m still pretty new to research so no big achievements yet. At the moment I’m working towards getting my PhD, but that won’t be for another couple of years. I’m also waiting to see if I’ll be accepted to speak at some big international conferences over the next few months, so that will be a big achievement for me if I am accepted.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I’ve just started so nothing yet! I have been doing some work about how fast we can drain a reactor design called Molten Salt Fast reactor in an emergency, it turns out pretty quickly and this is good for the overall safety of the plant. Hopefully I have enough to publish but we will see…

Comments