Published 3 February 2009
What’s it like to be a scientist? That’s the theme of a special supplement in the latest issue of Science Spin magazine.
It looks at how and why a wide range of people have chosen to make science a major part of their lives, and includes plenty of useful information about third-level science courses.
The scientists interviewed include:
- Tara Kelly from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre. “We carry out surveillance of all notifiable infectious disease and their outbreaks in Ireland,” she explains
- Dr Martin Leahy, who directs a big energy research group at the University of Limerick. He says that growing up on a farm has its advantages. “Your average farmer has to be a bit of a builder, a driver, and even a midwife.”
- William Cirillo, a trained physicist who is now a software consultant. He talks about how many top Irish physicists are now moving into the software world. One of them, TCD physics graduate PJ King, set up his own software company in 1995 and went on to make millions. He is even booked to fly into space on Virgin Galactic
- Dr Kay Nolan from UCD, who recalls how she chose her career in life sciences, and explains how dogs can provide valuable clues to the origin and cause of some human diseases
- Paul Miney, who traces his career from leading a team of process engineers in Intel Ireland to becoming a project manager in the nanoscience research centre at CRANN
- Geologist Laura Byrne, who talks about her award winning project to map the Dingle Peninsula and its natural history
- Anthony Brew, who is studying Machine Learning to understand patterns within data. “Spam is an example,” he says, “we can see loads of good emails and loads of spam, and given this, can we learn a rule to automatically label something as spam or not?”
Download the Science Spin science careers supplement (PDF, 2.7MB)
