Highlights from the episodes published so far this year, featuring our role models and their diverse, interesting and exciting careers, including: Kerry Hill sharing the importance of empathy and having an emotional connection with the animals with her work in conservation science; Dr Rebecca Bowler on how she discovered 10 galaxies whilst studying for her PhD; Dr Sarah Moller's research on air pollution in remote locations, including Cape Verde and Borneo; Ines Cruz and her favourite aspect of working as a Veterinary Surgeon and Dr Jessica Boland shares how she uses high powered lasers as a key part of her everyday work.
If you know a group of students who would like to interview female or non-binary role models, please get in touch by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com
Likewise, if you know anyone who would be a great role model, let us know by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com
Follow us on Instagram @STEMUntapped
Check out our website
If you know a group of students who would like to interview one of our role models, please get in touch by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com
Likewise, if you know anyone who would be a great role model, let us know by emailing podcast@untappedinnovation.com
Follow us on Instagram @STEMUntapped
Connect with us on LinkedIn @STEMUntappedCIC
Check out our website
Izzy 00:04
Hi, I'm Izzy host of the STEM Untapped podcast. This week, we're releasing an episode with some of our best bits from the last year.
Kerry Hill 00:14
So where I work and where we fly the birds, is right on top of a beautiful Wetland Reserve. And traditionally, lots of people that work on the reserve do what we think of as animal conservation. So you know, they'll go out and do field projects, and they'll kind of do surveys on different animals or on the reserve. And I think the kind of work that we do, so sitting with our geese, and feeding them their favourite treats and getting to know them can feel like a really, really different kind of fluffy, if you like, like a fluffy approach to conservation science. So sometimes there have been comments about how emotional we are. And I think we're supposed to take it in a negative way. But we're all very good at recognising that the nature of this job is being emotional about your animals, and it makes you better at your job as well. Because if you really care about them, if that animal one day suddenly feels maybe a bit sick, or is a bit off of its food, and it's not behaving quite right, you are the best person. So better even than the vets to tell somebody that there's something wrong with that animal. So it makes you really effective at your job caring for them.
Student interviewer 01:20
We're just wondering if like any discoveries that you have been a part of, or things that you've found out through your research,
Dr Rebecca Bowler 01:28
My PhD project up in Edinburgh, was looking at some new data, some new images we had, when I started, my PhD supervisor, he sort of said, here are some files, go and have a look and see if you can find any galaxies in these files. And we were expecting, like based on the previous work, so all the all the other people had been working for decades before that, that maybe I would find one of the galaxies I was interested in. These are really special galaxies, because they are extremely distant from us. And so they're very rare, but very exciting when we find them. So I thought, Okay, I'm going to spend a few years trying to find one galaxy. But I set to work. And actually, I found I found 10. And that was really exciting. It was super exciting. It also made my PhD work a bit more interesting, because I had ten galaxies, not just one. So that's nice. But it was like really exciting for the scientific community as well, because it changed what we thought was happening in terms of physics, it meant that galaxies could form like more often than we thought before. So it was actually really interesting scientifically as well. And that's kind of been the stop starting point of my career was this discovery of more galaxies, and we were expecting,
Dr Sarah Moller 02:42
I mean, the work that I was doing in remote environments was was looking at, in Cape Verde, it was really looking at what is the background atmospheric chemistry like so what happens in the atmosphere where there isn't much influence from people. But what we see there is that we still see some signatures in some of the pollutants that are indicative of there being human activities, partially because there's obviously still things happening around the island. But actually, we get air mostly off the sea there. So really, that's all about transport from other areas where things are happening. And unfortunately, most places, unless you're on an island in the middle of the ocean, you can really see the impact of human activities, whether that be the people who were living there, or whether that be the activities that are happening. So we did some work in Borneo in the rain forests, and you see huge amounts of emissions from the activities around running a forest if you like. So chopping down trees, the machinery that they have the processing that they have, you see big emissions from and then you see emissions from there, they were planting palm oil plantations. So you see emissions from fertilising of those palm oil plants. So you actually have from almost any human activities, you see different emissions profiles, and some of those some of those emissions, we see a lot of particulate matter coming over which has been caused by emissions, either of gas phase or a particle pollution in Europe that's been transported over the sea to us and then we export our pollution elsewhere.
Student interviewer04:20
So what's your favourite thing about your job?
Ines Cruz 04:23
So my favourite thing I don't know, I think is seeing something that's ill. And then ringing the next day in general seem better already. And by the end of the week, and seeing Oh, she's doing better it's like it's it's fixing them really making them feel better. Because you know, if you do that, I have a happy cow and have a happy farmer. Nobody's happy. So that's what I like more about that I get more satisfaction from that than anything else.
Dr Jessica Boland 04:48
How we use the lasers is we need to be able to say how conductive and material it's to how good it will be in your device. And it's kind of a bit counterintuitive because you think that a lasers are quite powerful that they just blow up the material right and damage the material. And that can often happen if you have a really high power and a really short timescale, you can certainly damage materials. And this is actually used in manufacturing. If we kind of changed the energy in a pulse of that laser, you can put the laser on a material without damaging it.
Izzy 05:24
Thank you for joining another stem untapped podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, then subscribe for free on your podcast app. You can follow us on Instagram at STEM untapped. If you know of a school or group of students who would like to interview female or non binary role models do get in touch. Likewise, if you know of anyone who would be a great role model then let us know. Our details are all documented in the show notes.