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Meet physicist Helen

Helen is an experimental physicist and her work focuses on research.

1 minute 35 second watch

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I'm Helen Gleeson. I'm the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Leeds and I'm an experimental physicist.

So my day-to-day work now is really concentrated on research. So I've got a team of about 10 people who work with me.

We're doing interesting things, trying to understand some materials that we discovered. And these materials are really neat because when we stretch them, they get thicker rather than thinner, which is a bit unusual.

We wanted to understand how that happened. That's what experimental physics is about. So we've got people working on the mechanical properties, the optical properties. Sometimes we're doing X-ray scattering to understand structure.

We try and read around theory and understand some of the theoretical basis behind what we're seeing. You have to have a decent understanding of physics. Personally, I like building and doing experiments. So you have to have that hands-on ability.

You have to have determination because research doesn't always work. You have to be prepared to problem solve. And that again is partly around the bit, what do you do when it doesn't work. But also, something's happened that I wasn't expecting, like when we found this new material property. You know, how can we work out what's going on?

And that's the bit I think that really, I enjoy a lot. I enjoy the problem solving. Okay, you know, so where can we work ... how can we work this out? Where can we get the information we need?

British Science Week 2025

7 to 16 March: for British Science Week, discover careers in science, technology, engineering and maths.

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