Question: how did you come up with your experiments?

Katherine Haxton answered on 16 Mar 2012:

Usually we think of a problem we’d like to solve or a hypothesis we’d like to prove.
I think about what I want to do, what kind of things I want to find out, and then I look at experiments other scientists have done that have been published in scientific papers. If any of their methods are suitable, I will follow them and then my data can be compared to their data. If not, I come up with a plan to gather information to prove or disprove whatever hypothesis or idea I have at the time.
There are lots of standard methods that scientists use, and that’s good because lots of scientists have proven that they work.
The experiments I do are mainly to make new materials through chemical reactions, and a lot of those reactions are well known and work (which is really really good). Then I plan experiments to fill those materials with drug molecules, then I plan experiments to measure how quickly the drugs come out of the materials in conditions like you’d find in the human body.