• Question: what do you hope to do in the next 5 years

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      In my work, I have some cool research ideas that I can’t do until we start getting data from a really amazing satellite mission called Gaia that was launched by the European Space Agency last year. So, I hope to spend a lot of time working on those ideas and data from a cool space telescope.
      Personally, I’d quite like to be able to move back to Europe so that I can be closer to my family and oldest friends – I’ve now been away in South America for nearly 4 years! Maybe more important than that, my fiancee and I should get married (we’ve been engaged since January!).

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 14 Jun 2014:

      I guess the first thing I want to do is get my PhD. I will submit my thesis next year, so until then I stay focus and work very hard on my research! After that I want to keep on doing research in academia. This means I want to find a post-doctoral job, ideally in the same country as my husband (he’s been in the US while I’ve been in the UK for the past three years!!), so I will try to go back to America.

      From the more personal point of view, I’m planning a couple of epic bike trip adventures (yes, on a pedal bike). First I will travel form San Francisco to Mexico this summer (if everything goes as planned!). Then, if I manage to get a couple of months off in the coming years, I’ll go on my most epic trip ever: Paris to Beijing!!

      Apart from that I try to stay flexible with my plans. Often life comes with very surprising and unexpected opportunities, so I try to stay open minded!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 15 Jun 2014:

      The most obvious one is complete my PhD. I’ve only recently started it, so that should be finished in 3 and a half years time. I’d like to finish that with a few good publications under my belt and a good knowledge of the people in my area of research.

      After that, I’m probably going to do a teaching course called “Teach First”, because I enjoy teaching 🙂

      I’d like to go travelling, at the very least find out more about my country! I’d like to do the “Lands End to John-O-Groats” cycle at some point, but over a month or two and visit interesting places along the way.

    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      There are loads of things that I hope to do over the next 5 years. Next year we will start to collect data again at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, so there will be lots of new projects to work on as we try and make new measurements to study the difference between matter and anti-matter. Hopefully we will find something that we don’t understand in the context of our existing theories. If we do, then this might completely change my plans for the next 5 years as we put all of our efforts into studying this new effect.

      I am also starting to work on a new project that aims to study fundamental particles called neutrinos. These are quite strange particles that only interact very weakly with particles such as protons and neutrons and so we need to build really massive experiments in order to detect their presence. The plan is that in 5 years the design of this new experiment will have been completed and construction will have started.

      Hopefully, by this time, I will also have a permanent job as well!

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