Question: What is your motivation in achieving the knowledge from your research? How will it benefit society in advancing in various areas?
Keywords: benefit, motivation
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I think that, in the past, people build stuff, and cleared land and didn’t think about what would happen in the future. So it’s really important that we understand the environment now, and how we can manage it and live with it better, so that we can have good homes, and manufacturing and farms and stuff in the future.
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Good question.
Does all research have to have clear and immediate societal benefit?
In my area of research the motivation is a societal one. How can we live in the coastal strip of Australia and maintain the region in a condition that makes us still want to live there?. How can we not love the coast to death?
Just looking out my window, both at home and at work, and seeing the lovely Derwent Estuary, which was once heavily polluted but is now much improved, provides me with my daily dose of motivation.
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My motivation is to conserve the environment for future generations, but at the same time we need to move forward with development and infrastructure for future generations as well. There has to be a ballence.
A lot of the science and research that occurs today may not have forseeable outcomes until years later. Often the research one person does is combined with another researchers work to make big leaps foward. Like the discovery of the shape of DNA double Helix.
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That’s an excellent question! I often think to myself what is our purpose? As human beings? I notice that most people are driven by money. They choose the jobs they do based on how much money it will make them so they can buy things they don’t need and ultimately do not buy them happiness.
I like to think in order to be happy you have to know that you, as a person, are making a genuine difference and are involved in making the world a better place. So my motivation in doing my research and in deciding to become a scientist in the first place was to try and un-do some of the damage that other humans are causing to the environment.
For example, industries disposing of waste in rivers and streams and humans taking too much water from river systems is causing rivers to become polluted and dangerous. My work allows me to improve monitoring those rivers so that they do not become polluted and dangerous. If I do find that a certain river is in a bad condition then someone (or something) is accountable for that and must be held responsible for their actions. Then we must work to try and find a solution to improve that rivers health back to the level it should be at. As a result everyone can enjoy clean rivers to swim in and fish in and the fish and animals in the rivers are happy.
I think knowing that the job you do improves the lives of other beings (whether they’re human or not) is the most rewarding thing about a career in science.
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I don’t do research anymore because I decided that I was better at communicating science rather than ‘doing it’. I wanted to be a science communicator because we live in a rapidly changing world that is difficult for many people to keep up with. There are also many serious challenges that our world is currently facing and I think the more informed society is about science, the better equipped it will be to deal with these problems.
For instance, there are still many people out there that don’t believe climate change is happening when the evidence is clear that it is. I want to better inform these people about the science so that our society can move forward and start solving this problem.
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