• Question: What led you to research what you are doing?

    Asked by anon-241335 to Ross, Natalia, Martin, Gabriela, Ellie, Chukwuka on 13 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Eleanor Spence

      Eleanor Spence answered on 13 Mar 2020: last edited 13 Mar 2020 4:46 pm

      When I was at University in Newcastle, I started learning about insects. We went on field courses in Crete, butterfly catching in the sunshine and sampling insect diversity in Northumberland. This then came hand in hand with insect ecology and natural insect pathogens.

      I started working with fungi at Newcastle and found the interaction of the insect killing fungi with its host fascinating! Some locusts can even raise their body temperature through basking to over 40 degrees in an attempt to stop the fungus from harming them! Predators and parasitoids (things that lay eggs and develop inside another host, eventually killing it), will avoid insects infected with fungus because somehow they are able to tell!
      We still don’t know a lot about the ecological interactions of these fungi and other species and that is why I wanted to start researching with them!

    • Photo: Martin Johnsson

      Martin Johnsson answered on 13 Mar 2020:

      I once asked my PhD supervisor where he got his research ideas from, because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with ideas for things to work with. He replied, in his wisdom, something like this: “Well… you just do some stuff, that relates to the stuff you did before, and you come up with new stuff.”

      It turns out he was right. I started working on chicken genetics, just because that was what they did in the research group where I got a PhD student position. Then, I turned to animal breeding because that sounded interesting, but brought with me some of the ideas and methods I knew about from my PhD. And now I’m trying to combine those fields together to better understand what breeding does.

      So I’ve never really had a flash of inspiration or anything like that. I just kept doing stuff that related to the stuff I did before, but included some new stuff. 🙂

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