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The
‘science’ of it all…
Suhelen Egan, University
of New South Wales, Australia
A
typical day in science for me is a near perfect
mixture of family, teaching and research.
“Hump Day!”
Wednesday (12th April) is literally the hump day where I shift
gear from the focus on undergraduate lecturing and tutoring
to catching up with the honours students and PhD students
whom I supervise. Today, this includes a meeting with a second
year PhD student who is working on a commercially linked project
that deals with finding new antimicrobial
drugs from bacteria that live in association
with marine plants and animals.
After a catch up with some of the other members of the group,
I decided to get stuck into the analysis
of the whole genome sequence of my
favourite bacterium (Pseudoalteromonas
tunicate, a marine bacterium that produces a number of
interesting bioactive compounds).
We were fortunate enough to have this microbe’s genome sequenced
by a group of collaborators in the USA and now I have the
rather large task of managing a small group of staff and students
to manually sift through the data. For me, this
is a fantastic way of learning since each
group of genes that I study not only gives insight into the
way this organism functions but I also get to learn more about
cellular biology and microbial physiology in general.
After lunch, more meetings, including a 2 hours of listening
to honours students give a practice run of their final seminars.
I always find this rewarding as it is amazing to see how much
progress (both scientifically and with respect to presentation
skills etc) students can make in that one year.
By late afternoon, if I am lucky, I have caught up on most
of the science (never everything) and
I can go and pick up my little boy from day care and spend
the evening with him and his Dad (who co-incidentally is also
a scientist so my day in science never really ends at work).
While I was always interested in biology at school I would
never have said that I was
particularly interested in becoming a scientist
(to be honest I am not sure if I actually was aware that there
was such a job). In fact, I was never really career-minded.
My initial plan was to travel the world
and make up my mind once I was sick of traveling. Well, I
guess I would have to thank my final year advisor at school
for getting me to where I am now. He made everyone in year
12 apply to university even if we were not interested. Retrospectively,
I count myself lucky that I was accepted into a science course
and subsequently a PhD program and really have just followed
my interests ever since. The bonus is that
I did not have to give up my dream to travel, as there is
always an international conference that I need to attend or
collaborate in Europe!
Written by Suhelen Egan – Edited by Kavitha Arunagirinathan
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