Huddersfield scientist wins national outreach competition

Dr Peter Maskell - I'm a Scientist Winner

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 17:10:00 GMT

Why do we cry?  What is the most dangerous chemical?  Will we ever be able to clone dinosaurs?

Those are just some of the questions that Dr Peter Maskell faced on the way to winning I’m a Scientist Get Me Out of Here, a national competition supported by the Wellcome Trust.

The competition pits groups of scientists against each other to answer questions from school children on any science topic they can think of.  Over a two week period, the four scientists in each group are whittled down to an eventual winner through Big Brother style evictions, with the students choosing which scientist they want to vote out.

Although he was based in the “Molecules Zone”, which was sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the students came up with a whole gamut of questions, from science to philosophy, and a few that were just weird.  Dr Maskell enjoyed the challenge of answering questions from outside his specialist area of forensic toxicology.  He said, “It was good to have to think outside of my comfort zone and also allow me to investigate areas of science that I wouldn't have thought of looking at.  My favourite question was ‘why don't we melt?’”  (His answer is that we would if it was hotter.)

Dr Maskell admits that being named as the winner came as something as a surprise.  “I was expecting to be evicted at every stage. I thought that a lot of the other scientists were giving better answers to the questions than I was.”

His victory means that Dr Maskell becomes the second member of the Forensic Science team to have won I’m a Scientist – Dr Anna Williams is also a previous winner. 

Although he says that the competition took over his evenings and weekends for the last two weeks, Dr Maskell enjoyed the experience.  “I never thought I would enjoy it as much as I did. I would like to do it again - I'm not sure if I am allowed to though!”.

He plans to spend the £500 prize money to develop new resources to use in his outreach work with school and college students, explaining forensic toxicology and analytical chemistry.

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