Collaborating in medical research

Dr Richard Watts from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Canterbury talks about the importance of working collaboratively on the medical research he is involved in.

Within the University of Canterbury, Richard works with electrical and mechanical engineers and psychologists. Outside of the university, he is working with neurologists, radiologists and neurosurgeons at Christchurch Hospital, as well as researchers at the Otago School of Medicine. Much of his research is based at the Van der Veer Institute for Parkinson’s & Brain Research.

Transcript

DR RICHARD WATTS
In Christchurch we’re very fortunate in that we have a whole group of people working for different institutions who come together and are able to work together. So at the university, I work with people in various departments, I’m in the physics department, but I also work with electrical engineers, and mechanical engineers and people in the psychology department. Here at the hospital we have a lot of the clinical researchers, so we have people like neurologists, radiologists, and neurosurgeons, and these guys all have to talk to each other as well. We’re fortunate in having a medical school here, so we have all of this medical expertise as well. So there’s a huge number of people working on these projects and they have very complementary skills, we don’t know the same things. We have different areas of expertise and you really have to combine them to get a good picture of the overall problem.