Bob was voted the winner of the Organs Zone in 2012. Since then he’s used his prize money to support his outreach efforts and here he tells us more about what he’s been up to.

If you’d like the chance to win funding to develop your public engagement work, apply for I’m a Scientist at imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

Since winning my zone in this program, I have upped my commitment as a STEM Ambassador.  To this end I have spent time in developing my visual aids which I have used not only in my STEM work but also internally when teaching as well as external outreach event.

I have spent many hours taking images of tissues with many different stains demonstrating their diagnostic utility as well as explaining my profession to people.  The prize money has helped me to go from the rudimentary print outs to A3 foam boards with high quality images on them to make my explanations easier to many different groups and levels.

I have also been to a number of schools careers events that would have otherwise been difficult for me to attend.  This has also used the foam boards as well as other visual aids and anatomical models I have bought with the prize money.

More recently I held workshops at the Cheltenham Science Festival fringe event held by the NHS trust I work for in Cheltenham.  I delivered the same workshops 4 times on two consecutive days, with a number of colleagues helping.  The workshops were entitled ‘who are you calling normal’ where we went through a number of physiological measurements to demonstrate that normal is a range, when we understand the normal range we can spot the abnormal.

I have now moved to a new hospital where in addition to clinical practice I am also an associate lecturer at the University of Bangor.  I still use one set of the foam boards in my outreach here and the other set remains with my old department who continue to use them in public engagement events and STEM talks.

I continue to use my experience taking part in the’ I’m a Scientist…’ program in my daily life and encourage more of my colleagues to participate in the program.