Question: What are your tasks in the museum?

Helena Bates answered on 4 May 2020:

So I work behind the scenes at the museum, in a research division called Mineral and Planetary Sciences. Lots of people (including me before I started working there) don’t realise there is a big research institute attached to the museum, we have about 300 scientists, technicians, students and volunteers working with the collections the museum looks after. I work with the meteorite collection, which is one of the largest and oldest in the world. I’m not too involved with the day to day public facing aspects of the museum, I spend most of my time in my office in the basement doing my own research. We have some pretty swanky instruments in the basement which people from all over the world come and use, and I get to look at meteorites using them.

I do get the oppportunity to go up into the galleries pretty often to showcase some of the research we do at events like ‘museum lates’, I also give talks to the public at these shows we call ‘nature lives’ where people like me come up from our hidden offices and get to show some of the samples and work we do. I was also a little involved in the ‘museum of the moon’ exhibit, which was a temporary art exhibit where we had a 7m balloon replica of the moon up in one of the galleries.

But if you are ever walking past the front of the museum once the lockdown is over and you see in one of the ground floor windows a blow up green alien, come wave cause thats my office!