Question: what is the most import part of your job

Paul Roche answered on 24 Jun 2010:

There are a few things that I absolutely have to do as part of my job. These are:

i) raising money – I have a team of people who work for me on educational projects, and I need to make sure we have enough money to pay their salaries etc. I also raise money for schools programmes, so that we can go out and visit schools and make science more exciting/interesting.

ii) teaching – I teach several undergraduate degree courses, plus I work with some schools and adult education groups. So I have to turn up and teach them.

iii) Admin – I have to do all the bookwork, fill in all the forms etc. for the different parts of my job. If I don’t, things don’t happen, money doesn’t get raised, and schools don’t get visited!

After all that, I can hopefully still squeeze in some research work – and the most important part of that is getting the observations of the stars that I am interested in. I need to measure the brightness of about 30 stars, every night if possible, as we are interested in how they vary in brightness over months and years – most of these stars have black holes orbiting them, so we are trying to keep an eye on them.