When we are introduced to someone new, one of the first questions we ask is “What’s your job”? When I answer “I am a researcher”, behind the smiling face that usually replies “Cool!”, a big question mark about what a researcher actually does is hiding.
Well, I’m here to answer this question. Usually, people imagine scientists as wierdos in a white lab coat, possibly with giant goggles on their faces, that spend their life in a laboratory doing strange experiments… this description is pretty accurate, but it’s not complete.
Only part of our work, that is the performance of the experiments, takes place in the laboratory. Before doing any experiment, an important study and planning work is necessary: we need to know the work of other scientists in the field to avoid repeating experiments that have been already done or, worse than it, doing useless experiments based on theories that have been already proved wrong. It would be an enormous waste of time and resources!
Once it is clear which question we want to address, we need to be sure about which technique will be the most appropriate to do it. Not all scientists do the same kind of experiments, neither those working on similar topics or even on the same topic. During his career, a scientist often needs to learn new techniques and new ways of researching.
This is why is so important to keep up-to-date attending courses and congresses, in which researchers form different institutions meet and discuss their work. It is always useful to attend congresses and seminars, even when the topic seems to be far from our interest: sometimes inspiration may come from an apparently unrelated topic and you can suddenly have brainwave!
After the experiment has been planned and carried out, it comes the time for data analysis. However, a single experiment is not sufficient to prove or reject a theory: we must repeat it multiple times in order to be sure that the results we are obtaining are valid. This is the concept of reproducibility of science.
As well as been always keen to learn new thigs, researchers are also teachers. Some of them are teachers in the most common meaning of the term, teaching at university, but all of them are teachers in their daily life at work, teaching to junior members of their research group, such as undergraduate and graduate students, or new members of the group.
The happiest moment in a scientist’s life comes without the shadow of a doubt when, once their theory has been proved, they publish the article that describes it, the so-called “paper”. But this is another (long) story that I will tell you in one of my next posts.
Image from freesvg.org
Virus&Co. 
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