• Question: How does your work effect the environment??

    Asked by sebastiaan to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      @sebastiaan,
      hopefully my work on solar energy will help reduce the impact of human activities on the environment. This will be done by developing ways to provide emission free energy and also ways to reduce energy consumption in buildings.

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      My work doesn’t affect the environment one way or another. The focus of my research is medicine and curing illnesses, so it doesn’t really help the environment really. But in my lab we work really hard to make sure that we are as environmentally friendly as possible – things like not wasting electricity and making special arrangements to get rid of dangerous chemicals rather than just throwing them down the sink – so my work doesn’t hurt the environment either.

    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      Some of my research is about protecting important animals species in the environment. I have done some work to understand more about how fishing affects many fish species – both the ones we need to fish for food, and the others that get caught by accident. Right now, I have a project trying to understand how vultures in Africa find food and how we can make sure there are lots of vultures in the future. These vultures are really important at cleaning up the dead animals from the grass lands of many countries and without them, dogs can take over and bring in bad diseases like rabies which can be very harmful for humans.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      My work is trying to figure out why some environments end up really polluted, and what kinds of pollution might cause disease in humans. I’m looking at different aquatic environments, like estuaries and lakes to see how polluted they are. To do this, I’m using flamingos as an indicator – the samples I take from them have bacteria, which I look at to see if they are okay bacteria, or if they’re the kind that might cause diseases in humans.

      Knowing how polluted water might be in a certain location is very important, particularly in countries where a lot of people don’t have access to clean drinking water.

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