Question: What is a problem that you solved during your most recent project?

Joey Shepherd answered on 19 Jun 2018:

Well, like many scientists I tend to have several projects going at the same time. There are often small problems that you have to solve during experiments – especially if you are trying to work out a new way of doing something, sometime sthe first way you try doesn’t work. So for example, we are making an antimicrobial 3D printed material. We 3D printed some shapes to put into human cells in dishes to check that they weren’t harmful to human cells, but unfortunately we made the shape too big and it cut off some oxygen from the cells and they didn’t do very well! So we changed the shape, and now it’s OK. Things like that happen often.
But in the bigger projects, the last paper I published was towards solving the problem of eye infections that can lead to blindness – we are working towards making a contact lens-type device that you can wear in your eye (ike a contact lens) and when you take it out, it grabs all the bacteria causing the infection and pulls them out with it, so hopefully stopping the blindness. It gives us a great feeling to be solving problems like this!