• Question: What was the longest task you have ever done? and how long did it take?

    Asked by free022can to Tom, Sanjeev, Orla, Fiona, Eimear, Cillian on 3 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Orla McGee

      Orla McGee answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      My longest task was getting my PhD which took me 4 years. That was made up of a lot of different projects though.
      I think the longest task I had as part of my PhD was to get a full computer simulation of a heart valve being inserted into the heart of a patient. I think it took me over a year to learn the software, to get the images of the patient, make a model of their heart, make a model of the heart valve design and to get all the parts working in a computer model. It was learning how to do everything that took the longest. But it was fun and really interesting seeing it all come together. I’ve done similar computer simulations since and I can do them a lot quicker now that I took the time to learn how to do it correctly before.

    • Photo: Eimear O'Hara

      Eimear O'Hara answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      Doing a PhD was definitely the longest – it was basically 4 years of research and you had to write it up at the end. There were lots of ups and downs but it made me so much more determined and showed that hard work pays off

    • Photo: Fiona Malone

      Fiona Malone answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      My longest task was PhD. I studied strokes for my PhD and it took 5 years to build the robot also known as a biomsimulator. A stroke happens when not enough oxygen gets to the brain. A lot of the time, strokes can be caused by blood clots, but doctors and surgeons don’t know why some clots cause strokes and some don’t. I used 3D printing to build real life models of blood vessels that travel from a patient’s heart to their head. I then released man-made blood clots into the vessels to track where they go. My work showed doctors that smaller clots were more likely to cause a stroke than larger ones. My work also showed that having an irregular heartbeat like atrial fibrillation or heart palpitations increases your risk of having a stroke by 25%, which is huge!! I was also able to show doctors and surgeons that deal with strokes everyday how the clot moves around in a patient, which was really cool!

    • Photo: Cillian Thompson

      Cillian Thompson answered on 4 Mar 2020:

      As I am only starting my PhD I expect that will be the longest task, especially from looking at the other answers, but so far it was my Masters Thesis (like a 1-year report) which I did to design a device to help doctors give the correct antibiotics when a person is sick.

    • Photo: Sanjeev Kumar

      Sanjeev Kumar answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      In my research work, I recently developed a wristwatch-integrated sensor device for wireless health monitoring of the patients in a hospital. I started working on this project in March 2018 and finished in Sept. 2019. So in total, it took me about 18 months to develop the final product and evaluate the wireless performance of the device in a hospital.

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