• Question: have any of your discoveries helped anyone in the real world

    Asked by anon-220215 on 12 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Aina Roca Barcelo

      Aina Roca Barcelo answered on 12 Jun 2019:

      Most of the projects I work on are really linked to policies,either national or local. This means that I try to provide information to politicians about hazards that could negatively affect people. For example, I was involved in a project about waste management plants to determine how far people should live from them to avoid having respiratory problems. This project, and others published before, helped politicians to make a decision on where to put constructions restriction for residential buildings.

    • Photo: Rebecca Moon

      Rebecca Moon answered on 13 Jun 2019:

      Much of my work is in relation to vitamin D supplementation in pregnancy. We hope that our findings will contribute to a new public health policy with a recommendation regarding vitamin D supplementation in pregnancy in the future. But it takes a lot of time to build together a detailed picture before this can happen, so it will be a few years yet.

    • Photo: Shobhana Nagraj

      Shobhana Nagraj answered on 14 Jun 2019:

      Not yet, but I am currently involved in developing a digital health tool for village healthcare workers in India to help pregnant women, which has potential to help a lot of women – will be able to let you know in a year or so!

    • Photo: Kaitlin Wade

      Kaitlin Wade answered on 14 Jun 2019:

      As an epidemiologist, it’s quite a long task to get something that I discover to make it into the mainstream or to change a policy that will help someone or a group of people. None of my discoveries have made it to changing a policy but it’s very much a process that we need to chip away at. One discovery might not make it to policy and change a population’s health but multiple discoveries that all give evidence for the same thing might. That’s thinking big picture though – trying to change a population’s health. But, a lot of my discoveries have been published in journals and publicized into the public domain and there has been a lot of media attention with some of these. Essentially that means that, at a small scale, maybe my discoveries have made people think a bit more about their health and hopefully they have changed their lifestyle and behaviour to make their lives and health better.

    • Photo: Nina Rzechorzek

      Nina Rzechorzek answered on 15 Jun 2019:

      Well, from a ‘direct impact’ perspective I would say not yet – however some of the things I am working on currently could soon change the way in which we monitor both human and animal patients in intensive care, and how clinicians interpret and act upon the information collected. This could potentially save many lives, but we need some more evidence first!

    • Photo: Kate Timms

      Kate Timms answered on 19 Jun 2019:

      Not yet, but I really hope that in the future my work will help to improve the health of women and their babies. I’m at a really early stage in this work, but fingers crossed it will all work! Contrary to what you see in films and TV, science takes a long time because it takes a long time to make sure we have all the evidence and that any treatments are safe.

    • Photo: Matthew Bareford

      Matthew Bareford answered on 20 Jun 2019:

      During my degree studies, I worked on developing possible new compounds to use for anti-cancer medication, and one of mine was put forward to clinical trials – so that was pretty cool!

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