Question: what sort of experments do you like to do in the lad

Matt Kasoar answered on 11 Mar 2022: last edited 11 Mar 2022 6:01 pm

So my research nowadays is all based around using computer simulations and data science. Because we don’t have another planet Earth that we can experiment on in lab, instead I use computer simulations of a virtual Earth, to look at how different emissions affects the climate, and what impact this has on things like the risk of wildfires. So the types of ‘experiment’ I do might be things like changing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or changing the amount of smoke from wildfires, and then we can use computer simulations to see where those emissions go in the atmosphere and how they affect temperatures, rainfall, etc. It’s similar to making weather forecasts but looking at the whole planet, and seeing what happens when we change something. I also do simulations of wildfires using a fire model where we can change things like the temperature, rainfall, amount of lightning strikes, etc., and simulate how that affects the growth and flammability of plants in different ecosystems and how the amount of wildfire changes. But it’s still all happening inside a computer simulation rather than real-life.

The most interesting real life experiment I’ve done in the past, was when I worked on a biophysics project for my 4th year at uni. We wanted to study the propellers that bacteria use to swim around, and to do this I had to grow cultures of special genetically-engineered E. coli bacteria, and then put them on microscope slides which I would look at under a big microscope, and then use a powerful infrared laser to hold the cells in position, move them around etc. It was pretty cool.