Gills Club Q & A

We thought we'd follow up on our Executive Director Catherine being a featured scientist with the Gills Club by sharing her answer to one of their questions:

Q: What do you love most about being a scientist?

A: One of the things I love most about science is that it is really just a set of tools for approaching all sorts of problems from a fair and balanced perspective (though scientists can be ideologically biased, well-executed science basically can’t; that core of impartiality is one thing I love about the work we do). The same scientific process can be used to ask questions about anything from outer space to what your hamster prefers to eat for breakfast. It’s all predicated on the idea that by carefully collecting and analyzing data, we can learn more truths about the things that interest us—whatever they happen to be.
Although I sometimes find it frustrating, I also love that science never claims to know the final answer. Science is never finished—we’re constantly re-evaluating old findings on the basis of what we’ve just learned—and that means that we’re always curious and (hopefully) always improving our understanding of the world. I find that lack of certainty really exciting and humbling. There’s always something more to learn!