Question: what got u intersted in your work ?

Sarah Casewell answered on 13 Jun 2014:

I’ve always been interested in stars and planets etc, but when I was 13 I went to see the film Apollo 13 and I came out of it really wanting to be a mission controller – the person that is in charge of the mission who organises everyone. I then did a degree involving space science and technology so I could go and work for NASA. During my degree I took a lot of astronomy option courses about stars, galaxies and black holes, and realised that I didn’t really want to build spacecrafts, I preferred astronomy.
I was asked to apply for a PhD after my degree, but I didn’t know what subject would interest me. One day, I was asked to see a staff member about his project which was on brown dwarfs (which I’d never heard of). He explained that they were failed stars, which were so cool that they had clouds, and weather and didn’t look like stars at all. I was hooked, and have been studying them ever since!