Question: does anyone work with you in job

Jose Eliel Camargo Molina answered on 15 Mar 2019:

Science is a group effort. Even if you work on your own, your ideas are based on the ideas of the whole community and of scientists in the past. When you do your Ph.D. you typically work with your supervisor and/or their research group.

We look almost every day what new articles came out, to understand what new ideas and results are out there, and we travel a lot giving talks and presentations about our work in other universities or institutions.

Just here at Imperial, in theoretical physics, we have up to 4 talks every week that we can attend where researchers tell us about what they do and we can talk to them about it.

This means that there are a lot of chances to join forces and it is very useful to work in teams of people with different skills and expertise.

In my case, I have several projects going on involving different groups of people, or as we call it, collaborations.

As a theorist, I usually work with groups of 3, 4 or maybe 5 people at a time. Right now I’m involved in a super interesting collaboration of around 40 people that are working on using supercomputers to test new theories using results from many experiments.

If you are an experimentalist, collaborations are much bigger, given the fact that you have to build amazing super advanced machines that take a lot of effort and many types of experts. That means that some experimental results can be published in articles with 3000 authors!