Question: what made you quit your PHD?

Richard Fitzpatrick answered on 2 Apr 2025:

So I had been working for a few years with rats doing behavioural experiments, and wanted to keep doing this. The PhD involved a lot of other work with mice though and doing using a lot more in a short space of time to understand their brain cells and how they connected. I also had to use a lot of radioactive material.

Simply, I wasn’t comfortable being alone all day, worried about radiation, and sacrificing animals I’d never met. So I decided that if I wanted to keep working in memory and learning, I’d need to become a computer scientist to avoid this, as I could never guarantee this wouldn’t happen again in a job.