• Question: where was the best place you ever worked and why

    Asked by space4me to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 7 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Nick Goldman

      Nick Goldman answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Here where I am now, at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) (http://www.ebi.ac.uk). We’re part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which is an international organisation where 20 countries contribute to the cost of doing molecular biology research. It’s sort of like CERN, but for biology instead of physics.
      At EBI, we have staff from more than 40 different countries working in the same building just outside Cambridge. It’s an amazing place to work, with so much diversity of people, of science, and of the data we handle.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      I’m going to say that my current lab is the best. We have a really diverse group of people in the lab, everyone from practising doctors to software engineers. We do everything from getting samples of bacteria from patients to analysing the data, so it’s easy to find the right person to ask when you have questions.

      Secondly supervisor is really supportive, which I think is very important for a young scientist–science is hard and things always take longer to do than you think, so it’s important to have colleagues who understand that and encourage you when things get tough.

      Finally, we do a lot of science outreach activities here and I really like talking to people about science.

    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      @spacew4me The best place I worked was in the NHS before I became a social scientist. I was a genetic counsellor working with families who had genetic condtions. Does anything run in your family? cancer maybe? If so genetic counsellors can answer questions about whether conditions are inherited or not. I really enjoyed offering information about genetics and making a difference to families

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Years ago I did some voluntary work in South America, including a 3 month stay at a turtle conservation camp in Mexico. We did research on the pacific sea turtles which came to shore to lay eggs, as well as moving the nests that they buried so that poachers couldn’t take their eggs for the black market. We measured and weighted the turtles, and tried to find out why certain nests failed to produce hatchlings and others didn’t. This was a pretty amazing job. We lived on the beach, drinking from coconuts, swimming in the lagoon. The sand flys and mosquitos were annoying, but other than that it was paradise. We could really see the difference we were making when a nest hatched and the tiny hatchlings made their way to the sea, knowing that if we hadn’t intervened, the eggs would have been eaten.

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