• Question: Does your work save or improve lives?

    Asked by katie174 to Kate, Mark U, Tess, Yue on 3 May 2012. This question was also asked by sayers.
    • Photo: Tess Newman

      Tess Newman answered on 3 May 2012:

      I hope that eventually my work will have an impact on somebody’s life… although I’m looking at a very small area in a very large field. So, I know very much about very little!

      However, lots of patients require bone grafts – that is, they sometimes need new bone implanted into them when their own bone is damaged, or has been removed. At the moment most people rely on donors – either from their own pelvis, or from other people (usually those who have died). There are quite a lot of difficulties with this, and there often isn’t a lot of donor bone available. So people working in my area are trying to create artificial bone that we can use instead. My work is trying to improve how we make this artificial bone living – by filling it with living bone cells. Hopefully this will work and I will make a difference! That is the main reason I was interested in doing my PhD…

    • Photo: Mark Uphill

      Mark Uphill answered on 4 May 2012:

      I’m fortunate that some of my research can be done on individual athletes. For example, if a golfer repeatedly gets angry and finds that this anger influences his/her game negatively, I might use a number of psychological strategies to see if they lessen his/her anger and improve their performance. To the extent that athletes may want to feel better when playing sport or perform better, hopefully some of my research helps individual athletes.. Good question katie174 🙂

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