• Question: what is your job? and what does it involve

    Asked by kingie to Sarah, Panos on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Panos Soultanas

      Panos Soultanas answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      My job involves many different things and is quite fun to do. I am supervising a research group of PhD students and researchers that do research every day, I teach to undergraduate students at University, I do some administration (meetings, discussions etc), I read a lot about science and new discoveries and think how to solve unaswered questions and problems.

    • Photo: Sarah Burl

      Sarah Burl answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      My job is a postdoctoral scientist and it involves in running a field team and a lab team and doing lots of experiments with small volumes of blood. The field team recruit infants from small comminties in The Gambia and they take a teaspoon of blood then they bring the blood to the lab and I do lots of experiments to see how they have responded to the vaccines that they have been given. I have done two studies in the Gambia, one looked at how infants responded to BCG vaccination which is given at birth against TB and the second study looked at how infants responded to small molecules that are being developed to make vaccines more effective. At the moment you have to have several doses of some fo the vaccines you get because they are not very effective (we call this not very immunogenic). By adding a molecule to the vaccines called an adjuvant we could make the vaccine better and then we may be able to give less vaccines.

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