 Hi, my name is Tim Freel and I'm the liaison officer for the Maristam project. Welcome to the Sharing Science Pathways with Maristam panel discussion. This event will be in two parts. The first part is a pre-recorded section of about 25 minutes in length, which is a block of one-on-one interviews with our panelists. We'll then join you live to answer your questions for the second half of this one-hour event. During this event, you'll meet four ANU students who have shared their science knowledge via the Maristam project. You'll hear about their experiences in learning to communicate science in a video format, how studying science influences and is influenced by society, and the multitude of other exciting opportunities studying at ANU has to offer. So what is the Maristam project? It's a volunteer-powered initiative to help high school students learn science. We create videos and worksheets covering science content and link in all the cool research that is going on within the ANU community, things like Bose Einstein condensates in physics and stomata and food crop sustainability in biology. Everything we create is then provided free to students everywhere. Our volunteers are university students, researchers and teachers from every field and they have all contributed and developed their skills in a multitude of different ways and not just by being in front of the camera. Let's first get to know each of our four panelists and then we'll join you live to answer all of your exciting questions that you've submitted via the chat function. Hi there, I'm joined by Matt Goh who has previously studied a Bachelor of Philosophy in Science here at the Australian National University. Thanks Matt for joining us. Can you share about what you're currently doing with your time? Yep, sure. So I'm a theoretical physicist and I'm currently working as a research assistant at the Australian National University. So I'm working in sort of quantum matter, Bose Einstein condensates and I'm working on some theoretical work, some simulations to devise new protocols to produce Bose Einstein condensates so that they can be used for applications like precision sensing and quantum computing and other applications. And is this what you were doing as part of the research in your degree itself? It's closely related. So I did quite a bit of research in my Bachelor of Philosophy degree and the most significant part of that was my Honours project which was a one year project at the end of my degree and so in this project I was working on a closely related quantum control problem. I'm currently working in the same research group using very similar techniques but to a slightly different problem. Fantastic and taking a step back what made you decide to tackle a science degree in the first place? So I think it comes down to a combination of two things. The first and certainly most fundamental was a sort of fascination with discovering new knowledge, with learning, with advancing the frontiers of science. And second to that I guess was the fact that I'm quite technically minded and I wanted to pursue something like mathematics or physics or computer science and I think that combined with my interest in fundamental questions and reductionism brought me to physics. So as part of the research that you're working on at the moment and previously have worked on, you've been involved in a lot of global interaction, not just here within the ANU, can you tell us about how you've worked across the globe with different researchers? Certainly, so ultimately all good science ends up being global on some scale and as part of my degree I did a number of summer research programs across the world including two visits to the Weizmann Institute of Science and so these programs, the International Summer Science Institute at the Weizmann Institute and then the Kutsenett Getz Summer School brought together students from across the globe from many different countries, from many different disciplines to study together, learn together and conduct research in groups at the institute. The most recent of these, the second time I visited, I actually ended up publishing a research paper with that group and so again coming back to this sort of global scientific collaboration. I'm now on a scientific paper between ANU and the Weizmann Institute and even after I left the institute we continued to review manuscripts and do science and analyse data and it never really stopped even just because you've left another country doesn't mean that the global process of science stops. In more recent times I am just at the moment about two months away from starting my PhD at the University of Oxford where I've been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and even after I leave I will be sort of bringing in techniques from across the world working with my research group in Oxford probably continuing to collaborate with my research group here in ANU and building up a sort of global network of peers. Particularly in theoretical research I find just having a wide bank of knowledge from across the globe is incredibly helpful and so many of these collaborations, these interesting fusions of different fields of science start in conversations between global peers that eventually evolve into new disciplines, new research. So you mentioned that you've been involved in a paper that's been published and that was with a, sounds like a global, people from all across the world named on that paper. Can you tell us a little bit about the peer review process for that paper? Sure. So peer review is also a very global process. So this scientific paper we published already the authorship was quite diverse, we had of course an Australian, we had a French person, we had several Israelis but then on top of that we wrote the manuscript, we submitted it to an international journal to an American journal and then there was a blind peer review process in which the paper was forwarded to three reviewers from across the world. They were anonymous so we don't know who they were and they proceeded to give feedback on a paper, criticism on aspects of it that they were doubtful about and methods to improve it. And so not only was that there that core authorship groups that worked together at the Fleischmann Institute but there was also these three unseen peer reviewers who provided their own feedback, their own commentary, who checked our work, who made sure that it was legitimate and so the number of countries involved in this work was possibly up to six. It's really exciting that as part of your initial step into studying science that you've been able to work within the international community that makes up science. Hi there, I'm joined by Sasha Whittle who is currently studying adult degree here at the Australian National University. Her first part of her degree is a Bachelor of Science majoring in chemistry and the second part of her double degree is a Bachelor of Visual Art majoring in the community. Thanks Sasha for joining us today. No worries. So to kick off with Sasha, can you please share about what you are currently doing with your time? So I'm in my last semester of uni. I have finished my science degree now and I'm sort of just polishing off my visual art degree. It's all online at the moment which is really interesting for both students and staff. Making sort of with what's available around us is very interesting and I'm really lucky at the moment to be working with ANU Innovation as well. So I help student startups and student innovation projects. So yeah, that's been really fun. A lot of multidisciplinary teams, lots of exciting sort of projects and ideas floating around and I think definitely the double degree sort of multidisciplinary aspect led me towards that sort of a career path. Yeah can I pull on that a little bit? So you're doing a degree that people might not consider putting together. When people think about doing a science degree, they normally think about doing with engineering to get both sides of like the physics realm or doing biotechnology and those kind of crossovers. But you've gone for what are two ends of the ANU campus physically and literally in the content you're studying. Can you tell us about why you chose to study this double degree? So much like engineering I guess it is an applied degree. It is making, it's creative and in high school I really enjoyed science but I also really enjoyed art as well and ANU was one of the few places in which I could do both. Hence I moved here from Perth and yeah haven't regretted it. The flexible double degree means that I can do both at the exact same time while running around universities a bit of a hassle. It's good fun and they do somewhat lead into each other as well. With metals missing a lot of the processes and techniques I've sort of touched upon more theoretically in chemistry and then I can use that knowledge to sort of understand the inner workings of the metal and the different materials I'm using so in that respect has been really really great. So you've done a plenty of different things within your studies and I'm interested to know in particular about this cross-disciplinary approach to science that you've had throughout your studies. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah I think a lot of people are doing double degrees of ANU which is really cool because although you'll meet a lot of people doing science while doing a science degree they're also doing business courses and they're also in engineering and anthropology and a whole bunch of different other things so bringing in all those perspectives and sort of applying science in all those different fields is just really cool and to see it happen at like a student level is also yeah really amazing to see. And there was a specific project that you worked on with an academic here called ED. Can you tell us about about the research project that you did? One of the most exciting projects that I did in my chemistry degree was a research project with ED who's a physical chemist. With that I got to sort of design a project essentially and part of that was sort of finding out a way to gather this data that I was getting from this experiment and while like I know a lot of high school experiments you sort of sit there and look at the time and take the temperature every minute with this I got to design sort of a system and with hardware that sends the data directly to my laptop and then through that I can make graphs and see what's happening in real time which was really exciting and really cool to be able to not have to note take essentially. That sounds like a lot of data like were you working with giant excel spreadsheets? Was your computer able to handle this much data? While my computer is an older model she does okay it was yeah a lot of excel spreadsheets a lot of Python sort of data compiling as well but from that I could see a graph basically in real time so fairly early on I'd know if it was a throwaway set or a useful set. Fantastic thank you so much Sasha for taking us through your journey thus far so it's been a pleasure chatting with you. No worries thanks for having me. Hi there I'm joined by Michael McTeague who has previously studied at the Australian National University. Michael studied a Bachelor of Philosophy in Science and had majors in Chemistry and Mathematics and completed honours in Chemistry. Thanks Michael for joining us today. I don't think so having me. That's great so let's start off by learning a little bit about you can you share with us what you're currently doing with your time after your completed study? Yeah sure so I graduated from HANY last year like you said and I'm currently employed at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare or AIHW as a statistician and data analyst in the graduate program so for anyone who hasn't heard of AIHW which includes me last year I like to think of it as kind of like the ABS but for health statistics so we analyse data from a wide range of sources such as like Medicare and stuff like that and then we pull it all together and put out reports on how diseases and different health outcomes are affecting Australians and different groups of Australians so this year has actually been sort of good for business in terms of bushfires and pandemics so lots of work for us. Definitely a whole lot of data that you've been able to analyse and work. I would take a step back kind of towards the beginning of your studies and understand what made you decide to tackle a science degree and potentially in particular the Bachelor of Philosophy in Science here at the ANU. I've always really appreciated and enjoyed the evidence-based approach to tackling problems so starting out by working out what you know or what you assume that you know and then how you can logically introduce different things from that and some quite unexpected things sometimes that might surprise you and I guess sort of on the flip side to that I also enjoyed testing out those assumptions you know are these things actually true how do we know they're true and really probing down into that and things tend to get a lot more messy and complicated than you know they might appear also just fine science really fun like you get to look at different things from planets to atoms and it's just really fascinating funny how the universe works. You mentioned there about complex systems and I'd like to pull a little bit more on that so science is based around dealing with complex problems and theories. What has been your experience during your studies in terms of working within that space? Well I guess coming out of high school you know I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how things worked in science but what I found as I sort of progressed to uni is that like I was saying things turned out to be a bit more complicated than we think so maybe in high school chemistry early in high school you learn that electrons go around atoms in rings and then maybe in college or in first year you sort of get oh no it's a bit more complicated they have different shape things they go around in and then you get further it's like oh the probability of being here and it all just gets a lot more messier and complicated you know as you're learning that you're sort of following the history and the evolution of science you know we come up with a model or a theory that works well enough and can explain what we need it to might work really well for a time but then we come across something that we can't quite explain with that model or it has problems like it predicts something that we can't see or we don't observe and so we have to really dig a bit deeper and like oh is this thing we're thinking is true is that actually true and that reveals us to a better understanding of the universe even if it is a potentially messier more complicated one than we'd like to think. The final question I've got for you is around a cross-disciplinary approach to science how do you feel that science is a cross disciplinary approach to bringing in all those different aspects? I guess when I started uni I knew I kind of liked science but I wasn't sure which part of science you know I enjoyed maths and chemistry but also physics and computer science and so doing my degree there knew I could sort of explore those different options and wasn't funneled into any particular one. You can't cleanly separate you know where does chemistry end and physics begin and where does that end and maths start they all interweave and stuff so the area I ended up going into is computational quantum chemistry and that pulls from all those fluids I really enjoyed so you can use your mathematical knowledge to apply like models similar to physics to explain how chemicals react and you use computers to model that because it's too hard to do by hand. One other good thing I found going through uni is that having friends doing different parts of science so I had some friends who were really into that maths and if I encountered a problem in my chemistry project they'd be like oh that's similar to this problem I had over here and you wouldn't think that chemistry and maths would have much in common but turns out there's a bit under the surface that you know they're not that different. Sounds like you've had a very interesting journey through your studies and also as you've started your working postgraduate life so thank you Michael for sharing this journey with us. No worries thank you very much for having me on. 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 analysing 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 analysing 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 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 analyse the data and draw out the 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 like the 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 like 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 like the past few years since I started my PhD we have we've had so many international like 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 like 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 those the conclusions that you can get from those ideas so once you've collected the data and you've analyzed it you know 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 and like 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 set like 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 the 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 have you need to consider both of these things when you're building up a picture of what what the physics is I guess basically so what is actually happening in 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 you know file sizes of gigabytes worth of raw data that we then you know 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 I will leave it there all right thank you very much