Question: why are you doing a project

Dean Whittaker answered on 16 Jun 2010:

I handle several projects as part of my PhD. These include high pressure studies, inelastic neutron scattering (looking at phonons – which are like heat waves in materials) and I’ve started to move into x-ray diffraction, looking at the structure of the atoms of stuff under normal conditions. I’m doing them all for 3 reasons. Firstly, my supervisors need me to do work with this stuff, secondly I find it all interesting and a challenge and third, these are all relatively knew areas for glass research (except the x-rays) and I like being the first to do something. I was the first person to look at the complete set of vibrations in a glassy material – that was extremely tough (I had to write the software to do it, perform six very difficult experiments with time constraints and lobby a lot of people). It might sound a bit boring but it’s great to be the first in something and be referred to as an expert.