Every year the Royal College of Science Union‘s (RCSU) international science communication competition, the Science Challenge, welcomes entrants from schools across the globe. This year’s competition focused on climate change, with questions set by Professor Lord Robert Winston, Professor Kathy Sykes, Professor Richard Templer and Dr Paulo Ceppi.
In this post RCSU Vice President Operations, Trinity Stenhouse, reflects on what led her to the VPO position as a first year undergraduate. why the Science Challenge has been designed to focus on sci comm for non-specialist audiences, and the importance of making science meaningful.
Dr Viraj Perera is Director of Industry Partnerships and Commercialisation in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. In this post he highlights the reasons why the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme, run by Innovate UK, is such a valuable opportunity for collaboration and funding, detailing how FoNS academics can learn more about the scheme and its benefits.
By Viraj Perera
Championing translational research
Innovate UK is the nation’s innovation agency and is a part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Its approved budget for 2021-22 is £667 million, which is greater than the budgets approved for BBSRC, AHRC and ESRC funding combined. This clearly indicates a major thrust towards championing translational research in solving real-world problems in industry settings. (more…)
The Imperial Bioscience Review (IBR) is a student-led project, publishing articles on emergent and established fields of bioscience. The team aims to remove barriers to science by providing accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and inclusive articles that are free-to-access.
Life Sciences undergraduate student, Andres Hernandez Maduro, is a contributor. In this post he shares insights into IBR’s editorial and publishing process, and why it’s such a rewarding role alongside his curricular studies.
By Andres Hernandez Maduro
Sci comm and collaboration
Imperial Bioscience Review (IBR) published pieces are short, evidence-based summaries of topics that interest student contributors – and these articles are made freely available online. Since its inception just over a year ago, IBR has extended its base to over 100 writers across several undergraduate and postgraduate courses. With articles published online on a weekly basis, the collection of work has quickly grown to over 400 review pieces. In addition, IBR produces a termly magazine to showcase our writers’ work to the college community, kindly supported by the Department of Life Sciences. (more…)
In this post, Naima Sykes, Global Stakeholder Engagement Manager for Target Malaria, shares an animation video that the Target Malaria team developed, detailing their approach to stakeholder engagement activities. She also shares insights on how the consortium engages meaningfully with their varied stakeholders, and why this is so essential for their research.
By Naima Sykes
Target Malaria is a not-for-profit research consortium that aims to develop and share new, cost-effective and sustainable genetic technologies to modify mosquitoes and lower malaria transmission. By reducing the population of malaria mosquitoes, we aim to bring down the transmission of the disease, allowing people in affected areas to live without the burden of malaria and freeing up resources currently used to combat the disease. (more…)
‘Beauty of a More Colourful World’ brought together twelve postgraduate research students from six different departments to showcase how their research ties into addressing environmental problems. In this blog post one of the organisers, Yurong Yu, reflects on the experience.
Author: Yurong Yu | Photo credits: Yunwan Tao.
My fellow co-organiser, Neel Le Penru, and I initiated this event because we realised that the complexity of environmental problems requires interdisciplinary collaboration, so opportunities for interdepartmental communication among researchers is vital. It’s also crucial for junior researchers to learn how to communicate their research to a non-specialist audience, to achieve a greater impact.
Organisers of the event, from left to right: Neel Le Penru, Judy Xie, Yurong Yu, Ric Zhang
After some discussion we came up with the idea of inviting interactive and entertaining presentations from multiple departments, using different formats such as demos, prototypes, installations and games to inspire members of our Imperial community. The title, Beauty of a more colourful world, not only refers to the colourful environmental system, but also our diverse Imperial research community. The “flash mob” element came about because of the tight timeline – normally an event like this takes months to plan and carry out, but we didn’t want to miss the perfect window created by COP26, so we sped up and made it come true in five weeks! (more…)
In this post Anna Goodwin and Ella Robson, our FoNS Wellbeing Advisors, explain what impostor syndrome is and share their tips for keeping those niggling feelings of inadequacy – at university, work and in social situations – at bay.
By Anna Goodwin and Ella Robson
First off, well done for making it to the end of this term! Hopefully you’re now starting to feel settled in your routine, and enjoying your course and all that student life has to offer.
If this not the case for you, however, then fear not – you’re almost certainly not alone. The later part of the autumn term can be a tricky time to navigate. With Freshers’ and start of term events now a distant memory, longer evenings drawing in and the reality of course demands kicking into gear, it’s understandable if you feel a little disheartened or overwhelmed.
If you also find yourself doubting whether you deserve your place on the course, or whether you belong at Imperial, then you may be experiencing a phenomenon known as impostor syndrome. (more…)
My research is about extremes in the Earth system (think rapid permafrost thaw, AMOC collapse) and specifically about finding a way to include these in simple climate models. The aim is to more fully represent the spectrum of plausible warming that could occur by 2100, taking into account the current uncertainty in many of the Earth system processes. As part of my research, I’m consulting researchers in different areas of climate science to obtain their expert judgement on the range of plausible behaviour within the Earth subsystems that they study. This is sometimes our best source of information when observational or model data is missing. (more…)
Paul Brown MBE – Mechanical Instrumentation Workshop Manager (Physics)
Paul Brown is Mechanical Instrumentation Workshop Manager in the Department of Physics. He’s worked on projects such as theSolar Orbiter and the Interstellar Mapping Acceleration Probe (currently being built), was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) for services to Higher Education in 2017 and has recently been shortlisted for the Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the prestigious Papin Technical Prizes.
In this blog post he reflects on his experiences as a lab and instrumentation technician within an academic environment, and gives us insight into the projects he’s been involved in from a technician’s perspective. (more…)
My area of research focuses on biodiversity responses to environmental change, including land use and climate change. Currently I am working to develop a biodiversity indicator that measures and tracks the functional intactness of an ecosystem compared to a baseline. That is, looking at the amount of functional diversity – the aspect of biodiversity that is related to ecosystem functioning, and ultimately Nature’s Contributions to People – retained in ecosystems since human influence. An indicator like this would allow us to identify areas of conservation priority, to project into the future under different potential climate or land use mitigation scenarios and identify what actions would yield the greatest biodiversity outcomes in these scenarios. (more…)
My research is on energy access focusing on off grid renewable systems, specifically solar energy. My research project is mostly related to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, which is to provide universal access to affordable, reliable and clean energy by 2030. However, there are currently millions of people who don’t have access to energy, mostly in rural areas of sub Saharan Africa and Asia. I investigate the techno-economic feasibility of off grid systems to provide them access using renewable sources instead of using, for example, diesel generators that some of these communities often rely on, which are generally more expensive and polluting. I also consider the economic and environmental implications of different electrification options. (more…)
