• Question: Why did you choose to work in your particular field of study?

    Asked by anon-186460 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 8 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-186549.
    • Photo: Raquel Medialdea Carrera

      Raquel Medialdea Carrera answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      I got very interested in this area of study when I discovered that virus and bacteria still kill millions of people every year. I love being useful and helping to fight this infectious diseases that cause epidemics.
      I am particularly interested in diseases caused by virus and bacteria and that affect large numbers of people or that represent a threat to the poorest people.

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      I really want to help improve people’s lives! I’m really glad that there’s a lot of research into diseases like cancer, but I felt that it was unfair that there are still diseases that kill small babies that we haven’t fixed and a lot of money goes into diseases that kill elderly people. I wanted to help increase health equality!

    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      I found during my undergraduate university degree in biological sciences that I really enjoyed learning about microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and infectious diseases. I knew that we still have lots of things to discover and learn regarding the topic I work on and that the work I do could really contribute to helping people around the globe. To add to this, the career prospects are good for this line of work so it was a sensible choice for me to follow what was interesting to me.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      I chose to work in infectious disease but I wanted to do research that would help people. By controlling the spread of diseases, we can help more people live happy healthy long lives!

      I chose to focus on sexually transmitted infections in particular because they are interesting from a maths perspective. For diseases like flu, it is hard to know when people have had an infectious contact, but for STIs it is more straightforward: people have had an infectious contact if they’ve had sexual contact. This means we can use a different type of maths, called network science or graph theory, to understand their spread and how best to control them!

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