I wanted to use the prize money to enable school age students from a local secondary school – from under-served parts of town – to visit our state-of-the-art brain imaging facilities at my university (University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK).

Our local outreach team, whose goal is to widen participation at university from under-represented areas, had links with an appropriate school and we invited a class of year 8 pupils to visit our brain imaging facilities and also the wider university campus.

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…the students had to recognize different types of vegetable from an MRI scan which proved a great hit!

We had 15 students come to the campus and engage in a serious of brain-related practical activities (looking at brains in the palms of your hands – using tablets to show brain anatomy), learning about sleep and how to adapt behaviour to benefit this, and the main focus – a tour of our research dedicated 3Tesla MRI scanner (generously funded by the Wellcome Trust and Wolfson Foundation). The prize money was used to fund the vast majority of this trip. I was super motivated to have the students get up close to the technology that I use in my own research – together with AI – to study how the brain creates our thoughts, emotions and perception of the world.

The students seemed genuinely excited and engaged to visit both the brain imaging centre but also the wider university environment. Our local radiographer came up with a great exercise where the students had to recognize different types of vegetable from an MRI scan which proved a great hit! I hope that the students left feeling inspired and perhaps thinking that working at university at some point in the future might be something they would like to consider.

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