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Asked by mankybhagat to Edd, Jess, Zara on 23 Jun 2011.
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Zara Gladman answered on 23 Jun 2011:
Hi mankybhagat!
I really hope my research will be useful to society. The type of ecology that I do is called ‘applied ecology’ – which means that my work can be ‘applied’ to help solve problems!
For example – before I started my research, nobody really knew what the best way of finding a signal crayfish was. I did research to find out, and I tested different methods for catching crayfish on the River Clyde in Scotland. My results showed that using electrofishing (in which you pass a current of electricity through the water, which stuns the crayfish for a short while and lets you catch them!) and kick sampling (in which you kick around on the river bed and crayfish are dislodged and washed into a net) – are the best ways of finding them!
After I found this out, I told fishery managers and ecologists all over Scotland… and now they use kick sampling and electrofishing to find out if they have crayfish in their river or not! 🙂
That’s just an example but I hope other stuff I do will also be useful! By learning about non native species and how they impact our native ones, hopefully we can discourage more from being introduced and causing problems!
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Edward Codling answered on 23 Jun 2011:
I hope so – I think most scientists want to do research that will make a difference to people.
There are a couple of projects that I have done that have had an impact. Firstly we did some work a few years ago on how cod in the Irish Sea was being overfished and the fishery was badly managed. After our work was published we got invited to a meeting in the EU where we helped design a new cod management plan that aimed to recover cod stocks across Europe. This new plan was then implemented by the EU fisheries ministers. This sort of work was quite exciting because we could see how our research could really make a difference in changing how people behaved.
The other project that I am hoping will have an impact is the work we have done on how human crowds behave. We have only really started this project and done a few pieces of work so far. However, we are intrested in how crowds behave under different situations – e.g. like a crowd panicking to escape from a building or a football crowd. If we can properly understand the crowd behaviour then we may be able to suggest better ways to design buildings or better ways to control crowds (e.g. policing).
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Jessica Chu answered on 23 Jun 2011:
There’s millions of new cancer cases per year in many developed countries! Cancer not only affect the patient but also their family and friends. I think by finding a very good treatment for cancer patients will definitely have an impact!
Other cancer research topics include looking at chemicals (mainly in our diet) that can help prevent cancer cells from developing (chemoprevention) and things we can do to protect ourselves e.g. wear sun cream.
Also.. we can find more causes to cancers so we can reduce taking part in those activity or make the public more aware of what can cause cancer e.g. smoking or a diet with no or very low intake of fruit and veg. Fruit and veg contain many natural chemicals that will protect our normal cells from mutations … that will lead to cancer 🙂
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