Interview with Dr. Créidhe O'Sullivan

An Interview with Dr. Créidhe O’Sullivan of the Experimental Physics Department.

This week I will be interviewing Dr. Créidhe O’Sullivan about her life as a researcher and a lecturer. Dr. O’Sullivan got her PhD at Cambridge University in England before becoming a research scientist at UCC and then NUI Galway. Since 1998 she has been a lecturer with the Experimental Physics Department of NUI Maynooth and does research as part of the Submillimetre-Wave Optics Group of NUIM.

Question: What areas of research are you involved in?

Answer: “My main field is in working with telescopes and looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), that’s the radiation that was left over after the Big Bang.”
Dr. O’Sullivan tells me that measuring the radiation left behind by the Big Bang is very difficult as temperature readings are very faint and either a satellite is required to make the measurements from space or observatories in places like the South Pole.
“These are things that Maynooth is helping with, we’re helping with things like instrumentation for the telescope in the South Pole and the Planck Mission (with the European Space Agency, E.S.A.) which is due to be launched next year.

Q: What motivation was there to start this research in the department?

A: “It’s a curiosity in the research, I mean usually in astrophysics you’re trying to search for things that are really far away and actually quite difficult to measure but the reason why you want to find the answers is usually curiosity because cosmology is such a fascinating subject. We’re looking back to about 400,000 years after the Big Bang which is a short time after the Big Bang before there were stars before there were galaxies to find out how the Universe was made.”
This also pushes technology to keep up with astrophysics and meet the demands of researchers who are always trying to look farther back in time than before.

Q: What benefits are there outside Astrophysics?

A: “Well now we’re looking into medical research and medical imaging which hasn’t really been done before because it’s hard to make this radiation in the lab.”
Astronomers have been working with wavelengths of about 1 millimetre, just between radio waves and visible light and now this research is helping to find tumours and it even has security applications by seeing through skin and clothes to reveal concealed items.

Q: What other research bodies are involved?

A: “QUaD, the telescope in the South Pole, is led by researchers in Cardiff University and also in Stanford. The optics; the design and instrumentation, are an area that Maynooth specialises in.

Q: What do you like about working on this topic?

A: “It’s a fascinating area, cosmology is something you could easily go home and read a book about. You set yourself a problem that’s difficult to do so that’s pushing the boundary. It’s a fast moving area of research now because so many groups have become involved in it around the world. We get to test theories that have been around for a while because only now do we have the instruments to do that.”

Q: Do you attend many conferences?

A: “Yes we’re expected to go to at least one conference per year and publish our results and we give talks at these conferences. We’re expected to publish our work in journals as well.”

Q: Do you have any other interests or pastimes?

A: “Outside work I quite like orienteering, hill-walking and travelling.”

Q: What would you say to undergrads who are thinking about a career in either University based research or industrial based research?

A: “Being a researcher in a university is a really interesting job, you would be doing something that interests you and you’re challenging yourself the whole time. You never get bored, in some ways I think we have a bit more freedom[compared to industrial research] I mean there’s still pressure from funding groups to stick to certain areas but we do have a bit more freedom particularly academically, I mean we’re paid to teach as well. Also business goals for research may be more short term based trying to make a mass producible item that people can buy whereas we’re trying to make precision instruments for use in our field of research and our plans are usually long term ones.”

I’d like to thank Dr. O’Sullivan for taking the time out of her busy schedule to answer these questions.