• Question: How did you think of this idea? And why are you following through this research?

    Asked by Georgina to Aaron, Ananthi, Ashley, Christopher, Emma, Lea on 11 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by TomTom.
    • Photo: Emma Stevenson

      Emma Stevenson answered on 11 Nov 2017:

      My project wasn’t actually my idea, it was thought up by my boss who has many more years of experience than I do. My ideas come during the project when deciding which direction to take the research.

    • Photo: Ananthi Ramachandran

      Ananthi Ramachandran answered on 12 Nov 2017:

      Yes I’m the same as Emma, the project was the idea of my supervisor, what usually happens is the supervisor gets an idea for a project and has to apply for some money (called a grant) to complete the work. So that’s where projects come from, however in all sciences not everything will work in the way you imagined it would, so sometimes you find yourself going in a different direction. I have changed my original project slightly as I made some interesting observations early on and I wanted to investigate them further. So even though you have an original research topic you are relatively free to explore around that topic if you wish 🙂

    • Photo: Aaron Brown

      Aaron Brown answered on 12 Nov 2017:

      My project idea was based on a technology that already exists to generate renewable energy (anaerobic digestion). However, we are still dependant on fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) for the generation of most of our energy. In order to use renewable energy as our main energy source we need to make sure the renewable technologies work as efficiently as they can.

      So my supervisor (boss) applied for some money called a grant, so we could work on improving this renewable energy technology. If we can improve it, hopefully the Government will choose to build more of these anaerobic digesters.

      The reason I am doing this work is to try and reduce the impact of climate change 🙂

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