I am really interested in how we make hand movements! Sounds really simple I know, but it is actually really complicated!

You might ask, what do hand movements have the do with the brain? When we make any type of movement, special signals are sent from the brain to the rest of our body, telling it what to do.

But how do we know where to move to? This is where our vision comes into play. Our brain uses information from our eyes to tell us about the world around us and where we should move. Believe it or not the brain plans your movement, even before you start moving and you won’t even be aware of it. This happens in less than a second, but within this time there are lots of really important things that happen in your brain to make sure your movements are accurate (and you don’t spill your lemonade on your computer!). Vision plays a big role in helping us to make movements, and to tell us how to move around in the world.

Essentially, I study the link between planning a hand movement, and how vision helps us to make that hand movement.

I use an eye-tracker, and touch screen computers to measure hand movements and eye movements.

This is what my eyes look like to the eye-tracker:

This is what it looks like to be a participant in my experiments:

Usually my days are quite busy!

I work on my PhD for most of the day (I have to say that in case my PhD supervisor reads this…), which involves computer programming to create experiments, running experiments, analysing the results, reading papers and writing. I do my work on a touch-screen computer in a dark, underground room, where we have an eye-tracker set up which records people’s eye movements. We joke with our research participants by saying “welcome to the dungeon!”

I do a number of things other than my PhD though, such as organising events for other students, and sometimes these can be quite time-consuming!

I am also finishing my law degree (I’ll be finished in a few months…after 9 years!), so I go to lectures and do assignments throughout the week.

My days usually go from about 10am to 6 or 7pm (later when it’s a data-collecting day…), but it’s not all work! I often have lunch with my friends, or go to the gym, or go for a walk if it’s a nice day. While work is important, it’s hard to work all day without having a break, or having some fun to break up the studying!

Though, you can have fun in the lab too with some of our cool equipment!!

Well, near-space is close enough right? If I won, I would get my friends at Project Horus (www.projecthorus.org) to send a camera into space using high-altitude weather balloons. We can even send a model brain up to make a video of it taking a flight into space – I’ll bet nobody else will have a video of a flying brain in space!

This would be a really cool project because we can record amazing images of the Earth from 40km above the ground, and make it into a video to promote “I’m a Scientist” and to get more kids interested in the fun things you can do with science.

It would also be an interactive project, because the schools would be able to track the balloon online as it’s going up into space, and we can visit schools in the area afterwards and explain how it all works!

Here’s a segment that the TV show Scope did about these guys, to give you a bit more of an idea of what we would be doing: