• Question: What are you planning to work on in the future? Will it be time consuming, and would it be individual or would you work in a group?

    Asked by TerBium to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      I would still like to be working in the field of Alzheimer’s disease/related dementias. What I would be working on specifically, though, sort of depends on the results from my current project. We’re looking for changes in interaction between mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum in brain diseases. If we have some positive results from our current project, we have access to some drugs that we could test to see if we could fix this interaction first in cells, and then maybe in animals. It will be extremely time consuming if it ever reaches testing in animals! We work to extremely high ethics standards and it takes lots of time to make sure that the animals are fed, weigh properly, etc. We would have to do lots of behavioural tests on them which is also very time consuming. This would most likely be done with some help from other colleagues!

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      I do very little work on my own now! I have a team of data specialists that collect and analyse information about the food we all eat. I also have a small team of experts in information rights – so that when the Food Standards Agency holds information about a person or business we manage how we keep it safe and what we do with it to very high standards.
      I am in the process of establishing a new data science team – the work that we did on predicting outbreaks of winter vomiting disease (Norovirus) received some awards and we are trying to develop more examples of using this type of science in our work. It is ideally suited to the food system where things change fast and there is a lot of data.
      But having said all of that, I still like to get involved with the detail of the work from time to time. Because the work of my team covers a wide area I often need to get explanations to help me understand. I try to pursuade my teams that there is no such thing as a silly question – just an inability to answer!

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