what is your biggest acomplishment as a scientist

Rachel Hardy answered on 12 Jun 2019:

I don’t feel like I have accomplished anything major yet. I would say getting to where I am today and securing a PhD that I am very passionate about is one of my big achievements.This is because all of my hard work at University has allowed me to gain a position where I can lead my own research project, and hopefully make exciting new discoveries. By the end of my PhD, I hope to have published my findings in a scientific journal. This will be a big achievement as it means that I have made unique findings that are worthy of being read about by other scientists 🙂

Rebecca Moon answered on 12 Jun 2019:

Completing my PhD was a massive accomplishment – it takes about 3 years to do the research and write a PhD. Its a massive piece of work, I think my thesis was around 350 pages in the end. And after submitting the thesis, there is a viva examination, which is a discussion between you and 2-3 other experts in the topic. They can ask you anything and it typically lasts 2-3 hours, although some people it can last all day, or even into the next day. It definitely feels like a big accomplishment at the end of it!

Kaitlin Wade answered on 13 Jun 2019:

One my my major accomplishments was getting my PhD. I’ve had a couple of pieces of my work published in quite good journals, which was pretty cool. When I say ‘good’ journal, it usually means that a lot of people will read it, which means that it’ll reach more people and hopefully make a difference to the world and have high impact.

Ettie Unwin answered on 13 Jun 2019:

During my gap year I was working on testing a piece of military equipment. One summer during my undergraduate I went back and met a soldier whose friend’s life had been saved by the piece I was working on – that was a pretty amazing feeling!

Matthew Bareford answered on 13 Jun 2019:

My biggest accomplishment to date is the work i did helping to identify a chemical that was then used in developing a drug for use in a clinical trial for a treatment for cancer.

I am hoping that my current (and future) work might lead to bigger and better accomplishments all the time

Nina Rzechorzek answered on 14 Jun 2019:

So far, probably what I found during my PhD which focused on the molecular mechanisms of hypothermic neuroprotection (how cooling protects brain cells).

Innovative strategies are needed to protect the brain. Cooling is robustly neuroprotective, but currently of use in just a few patients with acute brain injury (such as babies starved of oxygen at birth). My PhD was driven by the concept that greater therapeutic potential may lie in understanding how cooling protects brain cells at the molecular level. Previous studies in rats had suggested that cooling could precondition or ‘train’ the brain to cope with injuries that would otherwise be lethal. Using human brain cells grown from stem cells, I mimicked clinical cooling in the lab to explore how molecular consequences of this protected brain cells from common injurious factors.
Cooling produced a molecular ‘cold-shock’ response in human brain cells and protected them from key death-inducing factors. It also dramatically affected tau—a brain cell protein that becomes irreversibly modified in neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Remarkably, cooling returned tau to a ‘foetal-like’ state, providing evidence that cooling partially reverses development in human brain cells. Moreover, by causing a mild cellular stress, cooling preconditioned the unfolded protein response (UPR)—a cellular signaling cascade that maintains protein quality control, but becomes overwhelmed in neurodegenerative diseases. I demonstrated that cold-induced changes in tau and the UPR represent significant components of hypothermic neuroprotection. Since cooling protects brain cells from molecular stressors implicated in both traumatic and degenerative processes, understanding the molecular biology of cooling (cryobiology) could reveal multiple therapeutic targets for brain disorders—without cooling patients.

All of my work has been published in Open Access journals, which means anyone can read it online for free. Here are some of the publications relevant to this work:
https://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964(15)00098-5/pdf
https://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964(15)30015-3/pdf
https://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964(15)30243-7/pdf

David Wilson answered on 14 Jun 2019:

I suppose all the exams I’ve passed and qualifications I’ve gained are a big accomplishment and I’ve also done a ton of cool science with some great people. However, the feeling of accomplishment gets kind of lost as time goes on. Right now I feel like my biggest accomplishment is being pretty happy and content with life. I’ve not always felt like this. I know it’s not specifically about science but since I am a scientist and science influences how I see and do things, science is inevitably a big part of my life.

Shobhana Nagraj answered on 16 Jun 2019:

Thank you for the question! Getting my Fellowship from the MRC to do my current research has been a really big accomplishment, as it was the result of a lot of years of hard work. Also passing my professional exams to be a surgeon and a GP.

Kate Timms answered on 17 Jun 2019:

Probably getting my PhD. Finally being a Dr after lots of years of hard work was amazing!

Question: what is your biggest acomplishment as a scientist

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