 Hi there, I'm joined by Lauren Bezina who is currently a PhD student here at the Australian National University in the Department of Nuclear Physics. Her undergraduate studies were at the University of Wollongong where she majored in both physics and chemistry. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me, Tim. I'd like to start by asking you to share a little bit about what you're currently doing with your time. So what I'm currently doing is I've been working from home a lot recently. I've been analyzing some data that we've collected in previous experiments. Earlier in the year, I was also preparing for an experiment. Unfortunately, we had some equipment fails, which sometimes happens in science, but while we're waiting for some new equipment to be shipped from overseas, I've had the opportunity to look back at some previous data and spend some time analyzing that. During your PhD, it's not just about being in the lab, it sounds like. It sounds like there's lots of different components there that go on concurrently. Yeah, that's right. I think that's one of the coolest things about studying nuclear physics here at the ANU is that you can work on the whole journey of an experiment. So you can be around kind of when it's being thought up and then you can work on preparing for the physical part of the experiment where you might be working in the lab and then you get to run the accelerator yourself while you're collecting the data. And then you are also the one who gets to analyze the data and draw out the physics conclusions from your accelerator run. And this is not to say that it's all on you. In fact, like almost every step of the way you have, there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of help. There's a really good team at the ANU and everyone pitches in with each other's experiments. And some parts of it are fun, some parts of it can be a bit frustrating, but that's all part of the journey. Is it that experimental side that drew you to doing a science degree in the first place or were there other factors? So when it came to my undergraduate degree, not so much. I think when it came to my undergraduate degree, I just wanted to learn more. It didn't matter what it was, whether it was experimental theory. I was just really curious about how the world worked. And it seemed like I could learn the most about that and about how the natural and the physical sciences work by doing an undergraduate degree. Then when it came to my PhD, I chose to do that because I met this amazing group of very passionate and engaged people who also gave me the opportunity to participate in running an accelerator. And so that's when the experimental side of it really came to the forefront and that was super exciting for me. You've mentioned working with your peers in this kind of research space. Is peer collaboration both within a university and globally a major factor in the science research world? Yeah, absolutely. Definitely in the past few years, since I started my PhD, we've had so many international... We've had visitors and we've also had people travel for conferences and things, but even since travel has become less possible, I guess, we still will have online seminars and talks and there's talks of moving some conferences online. Because science is all about testing your ideas and the more people you have pitching into that conversation and doing those tests, the more robust the conclusions that you can get from those ideas. So once you've collected the data and you've analyzed it, you've been looking at your data for a really long time and sometimes maybe you know the answer that you're trying to look for. It's really useful and actually really important to have someone else look at that data and give you some more ideas. Have you tested this and have you tested this? What about this? Did you think about this when you were doing that experiment and have you accounted for that when you've done your data analysis? That's what science is based on and so having these international collaborations, people working together but also kind of challenging each other a little bit is super important. So speaking of data sets, I would assume that in nuclear physics you're working with a lot of data. Has the data collation and analysis increased with the increases in technology that we now have available? Yes, so with my data, there's only a few parameters we actually collect when we're doing an experiment. So these will be things like position and time and sometimes energy of a particle that's incident on your detector. But you can then turn those things into like the angle that it hit the detector and the velocity that it hit the detector and you can get a correlation of one particular particle with another particle. And now you need to consider both of these things when you're building up a picture of what the physics is, I guess, basically. So what is actually happening in my case it's in nuclear reaction, that's what I'm looking at. Each one of these signals is another piece of data for even just one event, let alone when you start thinking about combining all these events and making a huge picture. We end up with file sizes of gigabytes worth of raw data that we then turn into some kind of physical picture as what's happening in that nuclear reaction. Thank you, Lauren, for taking us through all the exciting work that you're doing. We'll leave it there. Alright, thank you very much.