• Question: What was the most challenging engineering project that you have been involved with during past year?

    Asked by 526heak43 to Steve, Kath, Alex, Sean, Carmel, Valerie on 9 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by Lisa Savage, pfasakinn.
    • Photo: Kathryn Thomas

      Kathryn Thomas answered on 9 Nov 2017:


      Trying to invent a quick way of checking if my coatings work, I’ve worked really hard on it of and on for 8 months and it still doesn’t work.

    • Photo: Stephen Lang

      Stephen Lang answered on 12 Nov 2017:


      A combined prosthetic leg called Linx. It combines a knee and foot, using sensors in one to help control the other.
      It has taken much longer than a year, but went on sale in the last year and I was just one of a team that made it happen.

    • Photo: Alex Moldovan

      Alex Moldovan answered on 13 Nov 2017:


      Trying to stick really small crystals on the end of really small leavers..
      Crystal size = 150um
      Leave size = 125um

    • Photo: Valerie Bentivegna

      Valerie Bentivegna answered on 14 Nov 2017:


      Figuring out how to get useful information from ultrasound scans of little bits of tissues grown in a dish. No-one had ever done this before, so I didn’t really have anybody to ask for help.

    • Photo: Carmel Howe

      Carmel Howe answered on 14 Nov 2017:


      probably my current project. I make my surfaces out of patterned gold. I then have to make sure my brain cells will be happy living on them using different surface chemistry. When I know they’ll be happy I put my brains on them and leave them in an incubator a few weeks to mature and settle. When they’re ready I put them on my microscope, take a tiny pipette and insert it into the brain cell. I then stimulate the cells (put small amounts of current in to make it active) then I record the light intensity changes using a camera.
      There’s so many steps that it takes about 1-2 months to get to my final experiments and so many things can go wrong.

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