Keith
won the Hormones Zone in June 2013. We asked him to tell us what he’s been up to with his £500 prize money and here is what he said…
In May 2015 I was able to do outreach at the Drimnagh Castle Primary and Secondary Schools in Dublin, Ireland which I attended myself as a student. There I did 40 min workshop sessions with three groups of 6th class students (11-12 yrs) and four groups of 5th year biology/chemistry students (16-17 yrs). I used the prize money to buy reagents/small piece of single use items for the workshops (e.g. chemicals for making the tissues transparent, glucometer strips for showing blood sugars, etc).
I have to say I loved it and got some great feedback and engagement with the kids. I got permission from my supervisor and brought back some research equipment for recording blood pressure to do some demos and had got some reagents and samples to make some mouse organs transparent to bring back and show the kids too (of course they liked the gory stuff too). I got to discuss with them why blood pressure is important, how my research helps us understand the problem and some of the tools we use to study this (i.e. making mouse kidneys/hearts transparent to image – which also allowed me to address the ethical use of animals in biomedical research which helped to change a few minds).
The students even wrote about my visit in their class blog, A Very “Hearty” Discussion, where they say that “it takes guts to be scientist!”.
The detailed design of the model kidneys, which I hope will soon be made a reality
I had very early on been working on a model to try demonstrate how the kidneys concentrate urine in conjunction with The Physiology Society to try help explain the complicated process for A-level students. The model would demonstrate filtration, re-absorption and osmoregulation. However, after spending just under half the money on this, it turned out that the model wasn’t going to work as planned and would be difficult to replicate in schools in its current state. To further refine the model would have taken up too much of my time in the lab and The Physiology Society are now continuing that part of the project.
