Question: why did you want to be a scientist

Hazel Gibson answered on 6 Mar 2018:

I don’t know that I ever made a conscious decision to become a scientist, I just had questions that I wanted to answer and subjects that made me excited – particularly physics and chemistry (biology to me always seemed like a lot of plants, which I didn’t come to appreciate until later in life). I was lucky that my parents always encouraged me to follow my interests wherever they led me and because I was always interested in the outdoors and how landscapes were formed, it felt natural to me that I would gravitate towards the applied sciences, like geology instead of the more theoretical sciences like physics. But to be honest I always found science in general exciting – the way that you can do experiments to find out how and why things work, how young so many sciences are and how many questions we just don’t know the answer to! I also grew up in the golden era of David Attenborough’s tv shows which made me even more fascinated with the natural world. To be honest I’ve never been much of a planner when it comes to my career, if I see something that interests me and I want to give it a try then I will – it has led me to some amazing places, but science has really been the thread that ties my curiosity together.