• Question: How will your research help today's society?

    Asked by anon-227005 to William, Thibaut "Tibo", Harry, Georgia, Emily, Aimee on 10 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Georgia Orton

      Georgia Orton answered on 10 Nov 2019:


      The things I make (MOFs) already have a few industrial uses for storing gases. They have been used to release a chemical that stops fruit going off when it is being transported.
      I hope that the research I am doing will eventually help us make chemicals like medicines cheaply and efficiently.

      Some of the work I do is ‘blue sky’ research which means that it doesn’t have a real life application yet. By doing blue sky research we can work out wether something could be helpful to society.

    • Photo: Emily Sparkes

      Emily Sparkes answered on 10 Nov 2019:


      Very very very far in the future my enzyme has the potential to be used for making and decomposing plastics in an environmentally friendly manner. It could also be used to make some drugs (medicinal)

    • Photo: William Wiseman

      William Wiseman answered on 11 Nov 2019:


      I am working on Nano Zirconia materials with the hopes that one day, these will be used in medical devices to help people live longer, healthier lives

    • Photo: Aimee Egglestone

      Aimee Egglestone answered on 11 Nov 2019:


      Primarily my work focusses on developing and improving other peoples’ processes.

      My work helps out by decreasing energy demand, pollution and abundance of toxic chemicals where possible.

      I also help to make new materials more widely available by helping lab-based chemists with the scaling up process. A lot of the exciting work being done at the moment in labs is on relatively tiny scale, and the challenges faced at that level are very different from the challenges faced at scales needed for mass production. For example say Emily’s enzymes work and are adapted into plastic bags or medicines, but she has only ever made 10g at a time in the lab, her process wouldn’t always work as well when it goes to plant and is making 10 mT (10000000g ) at a time. I can help her work out what may or may not be a problem and work on her process with her.

    • Photo: Thibaut Deviese

      Thibaut Deviese answered on 11 Nov 2019:


      My work is helping us to understand more about our past. It contribute to update what is written in our history books! I think it is very important for us to know where we come from, who were our ancestors, how they were living. We can learn a lot form them!

    • Photo: Harry Wilkinson

      Harry Wilkinson answered on 11 Nov 2019:


      My work represents a stepping stone to understanding how we can start to use nature’s way of doing things ourselves.

      Nature is often much better at all of the chemical reactions we want to do than we are, so if we can start to do things as nature does, we should be able to increase the efficiency of what we do.

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