What is your biggest accomplishment that you have made in your life as a scientist?

Question: What is your biggest accomplishment that you have made in your life as a scientist?
- Keywords:
  achievement,
  career,
  work
Asked by anon-252779 on 1 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-257968.
- Ry Cutter answered on 1 May 2020: last edited 1 May 2020 2:52 pm
  
  so far, I have helped develop a theory of how diamagnetic material gets sucked onto the atmosphere of a magnetic white dwarf! This is a big achievement for me because it’s the first piece of independent work I’ve done without the aid of a supervisor!
  
  Great Question,
  
  Ry
  –
  *EDIT*- I should add, I still don’t have my doctorate just yet! The opportunity to do independent research doesn’t really happen until after the PhD. This is why it’s a bigger deal for me 😀
- David Sobral answered on 1 May 2020:
  
  Discovering that bright galaxies are much more common in the early Universe contrarily to what we thought and also finding the brightest distant galaxy that I named COSMOS Redshift 7 (CR7 for short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_Redshift_7).
  
  Apart from other things, I think it was also really cool to measure the “economic activity of the Universe” really precisely and to conclude that it has gone down 30 times over the last 11 billion years and that even if we wait forever, the Universe will not form more than 5% of all stars that already exist. So most stars in the Universe have already been formed!
- Paula Koelemeijer answered on 1 May 2020:
  
  So far, my main contribution has been to understand the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle. Specifically, I have aimed to constrain what the topography on this boundary is (how large are the mountains / valleys or lumps / bumps). This is important to know, as this topography tells us about the internal dynamics of the Earth, similar to how the Earth’s surface tells us something about it’s interior, and influences how the core and mantle interact with each other.
  
  I am proud of this, as I have done it entirely on my own!
- James Smallcombe answered on 1 May 2020:
  
  I would probably say the first time I was published in a scientific journal. The topic may not have had the biggest impact on a global scale, but personally it feels like a massive accomplishment that I’ve never quite topped.
- Alex Leide answered on 1 May 2020:
  
  As an individual I only contribute a small part to the overall knowledge of something. My favourite accomplishment was from my Master’s research project where I helped to explain something which had been confusing people for ~20 years. (Basically, how a ceramic can turn into a glass).
  The research was comparing computer simulations to experiments. The experiments check that the simulation is correct, then the simulation helps fill in the gaps about what is going on at the atomic level (because we can’t see this properly with experiments). It was nice when the experiment matched the simulation, then the details of the simulation helped explain what happens in real life.
  
  Outside of research, being the first in my family to go to University and then to stay and do a PhD is something I am proud of.
- Anne Green answered on 1 May 2020:
  
  In terms of achievements: becoming a professor. I’m the first person in my family to do A-levels, so even as a PhD student it wasn’t something that I thought I could do.
  
  In terms of science: coming up (with one of my PhD students) with a method which will allow experiments to measure the properties of dark matter, if/when they detect it.
- anon answered on 2 May 2020:
  
  Science-related, it’s the most cited work I would say, that is, the most read and referred to. But citations accumulate over time, so the latest and greatest work is not included.
  
  I my case, currently my PhD research has the most impact – the discovery of a significant amount of dust in Titan’s ionised atmosphere – there is so much that not only we cannot ignore it as a minor component (which was the case before) but it fundamentally changes atmospheric properties.
  
  But for me personally, I feel most achieved when I successfully present my work, and so far two events stood out – first one when I won the best poster award on a conference and second one when I gave a presentation and several people liked it so much that came up and thanked me. In both cases it felt like an amazing rewards for the all the work I put into it.
- Dipendra Mistry answered on 4 May 2020:
  
  Hi Daniels,
  
  This is a great question. For me I decided to be a scientist/engineer so that I could change people’s lives for the better. One way I got to do this in my last job was to help improve how a radiotherapy machine works. The machines I worked on used high energy X-rays to treat tumours in patients in something known as radiation therapy. I had studied this at university, and it was great to be able to put this theory into practise in a real-life situation.
  
  Kind Regards,
  Dipendra
  
  P.S If you are interested in other things I have done in my career – check out this link.
  https://education.theiet.org/campaigns/look-at-me-now/our-stories/dipendra-mistry/
- Greg Wallace answered on 4 May 2020:
  
  Good question! I’ll throw my two pence in As my career so far is a good example of stuff going wrong…
  –
  My masters project was basically scrapped after both the magnet and backup magnet broke. The first year of my PhD has been simmilarly plagued with dodgy samples… so I don’t really have many substantial acomplishments so far! This isn’t even particularly unusual in my field. I’ve still got three years of PhD left though so I’m confident my luck will improve at some point.
- Susan Cartwright answered on 4 May 2020:
  
  As an experimental particle physicist I work in large international collaborations, so it’s quite hard to lay claim to individual achievements. I think that potentially the largest discovery I’ve been part of, if it pans out (which it mght not), is the recent paper by my current collaboration (T2K) which offers the first strong evidence of a significant difference between neutrinos and antineutrinos. If this is right (our evidence is strong but not definitive) it may be the first step towards understanding why our universe is not a 50/50 mixture of matter and antimatter, a feature that’s been a mystery since the discovery of antimatter in the 1930s.
- Kerrianne Harrington answered on 4 May 2020:
  
  Finishing my PhD! It can be quite mentally tough at the end as you get really stuck into your work and want to keep going, but you must stop to write up at some point. I like writing about science, but doing science is more fun, and one without the other can be really dry, so it was a tough couple of months!
- Ashleigh Barron answered on 5 May 2020:
  
  Hi Daniels, tricky question!,
  I’d say seeing a laser product that I had and my team designed and developed being produced and used by customers.

Question: What is your biggest accomplishment that you have made in your life as a scientist?

Comments