A Day in the Life of a Researcher

I'm Pausto Gallucci. I'm a professor in this group at Eindhoven University of Technology. My name is Dr Elizabeth Arleo and I'm an associate professor of radiology. I'm Gilbert Oude-Essink from the Altares and Utrecht University. My name is Sally. I'm a synthetic chemist and I'm working on making polymers for drug delivery. As a radiologist I take care of patients by interpreting images and then I also have the opportunity to teach and perform research. I'm working at Deltares which is a groundwater related institute. The first thing I do I go to visit my students and to see what they are planning to do that day. In the morning I either have academic time or I get to see patients presenting for breast imaging. If I have academic time I focus on teaching or on my research. A typical day for me is writing new proposals, trying to get to new innovations. I do research myself or I write a proposal to get funding for paying PhD students. You have a lot of literature searching, planning some experiments. You usually get input from one of the postdocs in my lab. Then obviously you go and you try the experiment, you see if it works. Fun part is that we are at the front of new research and we do that with PhD students and together we get to a new level and I like that very much. I do get quite excited when something works, probably because you spend so much of your time having failed experiments. I search literature every day and I have always my Science Direct postcodes open. We want always a good idea of what other researchers do. These platforms definitely make a difference in my work because we know that the articles are available for researchers across the world on Science Direct. You can even have alerts so that you can directly see hey there's something new on the web and by doing that you're really at the front of the knowledge of the science of that specific topic. REACTS is, I'd say it's basically like Google search but for chemical structures. You can put in a reaction that you want to do where you know the starting material and you know your end product and it will come up with papers that have that reaction in. Through those techniques like SCOPUS and Mendeley, you know who are the best researchers and try to meet them and collaborate. There is always a group of core partners that are mostly writing the proposal. We decided to use the same tools like Mendeley for example, so we are sure that we use the time to write. Only by working together with very good scientists we can go to the better solution and really mean something for the community. Science is not just for scientists, the aim is to help everybody.