• Question: What is your greatest achievement in your science career

    Asked by to Clara, Simon, Thomas on 20 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 20 Mar 2014:


      For me personally my greatest achievement was getting a 1st in my MPhys, although I hope in 6 months I’ll change that to getting my PhD 😀

      But the best thing I’ve done during my PhD was writing some new code for a program called Geant4. Geant4 is a really complex program with loads of different bits of code all working together. I want to use it for something it can’t normally do which requires me writing my own code. When I got it to work correctly I got a little over excited and ran around the living room waving my arms in the air 🙂

    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 20 Mar 2014:


      I have been given 2 awards for my PhD thesis for demonstrating the possibility of in-gas catcher laser spectroscopy at an online facility, from which I determined the magnetic dipole moment of 57Cu.

      This might not speak to you so much, but to the community that opened up a totally new area of research! My PhD supervisor has since then been financed with a European Research Council grant of several millions £ to study this further, a new accelerator has been in Normandy to exploit the technique (also for several tens of millions of £) and the experiments there will start soon.

      But beyond that purely research-orientated answer, being told that I have inspired someone to go into research and seeing them back in the lab a few years later, that is a fabulous achievement!

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 21 Mar 2014:


      My greatest achievement was getting my PhD a few months ago. A PhD stands for Doctor of Philosophy and is the highest academic degree you can be awarded. It’s also the point where you get to start putting Dr in front of your name, so I’m now Dr Clara! I worked for four years to collect the data from my experiments, analyse it and write it up and it took a lot of work. The research that makes up the PhD has to be an original contribution to science, so something completely new that no one else has done before and I’m really proud to have achieved it!

      But, I’m still pretty early on in my scientific career, so there is a lot more for me to achieve in the future!

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