To coincide with my move to the University of Michigan, Seed Magazine has just published a series of ten questions and answers on what I do and what motivates me as a scientist.  You can read how well I fared (or didn’t, as the case may be) with questions as diverse as “How do you explain your job at cocktail parties?” to “Why do you do science?” on the Seed Magazine website.

I was surprised to hear that Seed sometimes have to hard-sell the idea of this series to scientists – who doesn’t want to pontificate about what they are reading, or who they would most like to meet?  But I must confess, answering questions like “Why do you do science?” and “What inspires you?” was tougher than I imagined.

Previous articles in Seed’s “10 Questions” series include:

  • James Kasting on the odds of finding another earth-like planet and the power of science fiction;
  • Kirsten Bomblies on the immune system of plants and how young scientists can keep inspiration alive;
  • John Rinn onwhy we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner; and
  • Amy Cannon on low-energy solar cells, training scientists to weed out toxicity, and what makes benign chemistry such a good business proposition.