Question: What has your journey been to become a scientist?

James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:

Hi cloclo,

After my GCSEs which is when you first get some choice, I did AS and A2 levels in Geography, Physics and Maths. I knew I wanted to go to university and study something geology related after a holiday to Iceland, a country so amazing I just had to learn more about why it was the way it was, so I chose what I thought were the best A2 levels for me. I probably wish now that I had chosen Chemistry instead of Physics as it would have been more helpful.

I decided to got to the University of Edinburgh, were I studied for my degree (a Bachelor of Science, or BSc degree) in Environmental Geoscience. This course involved lots of geology, and natural hazards like volcanoes and earthquakes but also looked at chemistry, especially the chemistry of water and soils. I planned at this stage to finish my degree and work in Environmental Consultancy, and work on projects to improve the environment. I knew to do well in this career I needed a Masters degree, so once I finished my BSc, I started a Masters.

I knew I like research, so I chose to do a Masters By Research, focussing on Global Environmental Change, this took a year and was 4 months of teaching and classes followed by an 8 month research project. During the classes I had to give a presentation on geoengineering, a theory we can reflect incoming sunlight to reduce the impact of climate change, because if we reflect as much sunlight as there was extra greenhouse gases, the climate wouldn’t warm. But what’s not known is whether this is safe, or if we would do more harm than good, as sunlight is very important for a number of processes such as plants photosynthesizing and also causing weather patterns.

After this talk, I saw that there was a research project using a climate model to study geoengineering, which is what got me into climate modelling. My supervisor for this, wanted to see if you can take someone who wasn’t studying Maths or Physics as their degree and turn them into a climate modeller (the tradition is all climate modellers are from those backgrounds), so he was experimenting on me. It turned out you can do that and while I was working on this project I saw the PhD in Leeds advertised saying it wanted someone to model a climate 3 million years ago and compare it to climate data. I was enjoying the climate modelling, I found the climate system really interesting and I love geology, so it didn;t take me long to apply for it and thanks to my experience modelling in Edinburgh, Leeds gave me the place, which is where I am now, with about a year to go.

The enxt stage of my journey, I hope involves a Post-doc which is a job for someone after their PhD in a university continuing to work on research, but we’ll ahve to wait and see if I can get one!