The winding paths of science

Two stories about science pathways - Katy Gosset heads to the University of Canterbury STEM careers fair to find out what the future might be for science students, while Claire Concannon learns about the weird world of parasite life cycles.

Just where might science lead? This week, two stories on the winding paths that science can take you on.

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Our Changing Careers

Meet Dr Sarah Kessans. As an undergraduate she started off in plant biology. For her PhD she trialled an HIV vaccine at Arizona State University. Now she's at the University of Canterbury teaching product design and developing space craft.

Tomorrow's challenge? Who knows!

Our world is changing and, with it, our careers. And science jobs will be among the first to evolve.

Katy Gosset visited a University of Canterbury Careers Fair for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students to find out what the future might hold.

For Kessans, much of the appeal of her diverse career lay in the opportunity to explore new concepts and translate them to business models. "Getting to work with people from all sorts of different disciplines and to develop things that are not things yet, to design entirely new sectors of industries. It's just incredible," she said.

Kessans urged her students to seize every opportunity by attending public lectures and meeting academics from different fields. She believed it was those interactions that would help create new industries.

"You never know where that next innovation is going to come from so a lot of this innovation is sort of the serendipity of new connections. So the more our students can develop new connections across different industries, the more opportunities they're going to have for both their education and then their future careers."

Finding your niche

Jeff Doherty moved from Canada to New Zealand to follow his interest in how parasites manipulate their hosts. He is at the end stage of his PhD studying hairworm parasites. Like other parasites they have a complex life cycle, in fact more interesting than most, as it involves the parasite moving from a water-based insect host, to a land-based insect, which somehow is fooled into going to the water to allow the hairworm to complete its lifecycle…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details