Category Archives: Winner Reports

Matt was voted the winner of the Actinium Zone in June 2017. Here he writes about how he used his £500 prize money to develop a session for children and students to learn about climate change using VR headsets.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

My favourite thing about science is the creativity behind it. I try to explore this creativity in all of the public engagement and outreach work I do when talking about science. I used the £500 to put on an exhibition of science art in Bristol for 2 weeks in May 2018, Creative Reactions Bristol. We had 35 scientists and 35 artists work together to produce pieces of art that explored the scientists’ research. We had over 2,000 people explore the exhibition and talk to scientists and artists involved.

I am continuing with the science art exhibition and in 2019 we have 50 artists and 50 scientists taking part with an exhibition across two galleries for 30 days. We’ve got a load of school and adult workshops planned to get people involved in science in hands-on and creative ways, instead of just teaching people about science we are getting them to explore and be creative.

Without the I’m a Scientist funding I would not have been able to deliver as successful an exhibition in 2018 as we did. This success has enabled us to continue with the project, growing it and making it more engaging for all ages.

As well as organising the 2019 science art exhibition, I’m also developing a wheel of fortune that explores the concepts of risk so we can finally understand what it actually means when the media tells us that coffee/chocolate/milk/bacon/[insert food here] is killing us!

Liam was voted the winner of the Sustainability Zone in November 2018. Here he writes about how he used his £500 prize money to develop a session for children and students to learn about climate change using VR headsets.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

I used the prize money to purchase virtual reality headsets to develop an outreach session with the University of Leeds. Whenever I taught the science or solutions of climate change, I was frequently told by children that they couldn’t visualise environments that are on the other side of the world, let alone how they are changing. So, I bought an array of Oculus headsets so that children can immerse themselves in coral reefs, stand on top of glaciers, or shake hands with great primates in the rainforests.

I have now developed a session – ‘The Reality of Climate Change’ – that will be taken on tour to classrooms, museums, and science events. Students will first visit environments in their natural, pristine state, before looking at the impacts that climate change is having on these ecosystems. Children so far have responded very positively, displaying a greater sense of empathy towards environmental change, and desire for climate action.

The I’m a Scientist experience taught me to be a better science communicator – and not just with children, but senior academics too. I was also so inspired by the curiosity and intelligence of everybody who asked a question. In my own work now, I try to ask as many questions as possible and explain things in the simplest ways.

Next up for the virtual reality session is to roll it out to as many children as possible! I’m still testing lots of ideas with different age groups to ensure the content is effective and relatable. Eventually, this will form part of the University of Leeds outreach programme, which reaches children from all backgrounds across West Yorkshire.

Stephanie was voted the winner of the Climate Zone in March 2018. Here she writes about how she has used her £500 prize money to buy filming equipment and software to start up a science YouTube channel.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

I have started a YouTube channel called Science with Steph. I have been a consumer of online video for a long time and know a few small creators, and so I decided to take the plunge and start a channel myself! It has been hard work (growing a channel from scratch these days can be very slow going), but very enjoyable. I have learnt many skills such as producing, editing and filming videos. I have also learned how to talk about quite tricky subjects in a simple way.

YouTube is a great platform as it’s the world’s second biggest search engine. Having said that it can be quite hard to have your voice heard (there are 500 hours of content uploaded every minute on YouTube). I hope my small channel will improve the platform as a place of learning and where people can improve their scientific understanding.

I spent £180 on a second hand camera, £250 on a microphone, and £70 on accessories like a tripod, lapel mics, and editing software. I have been making videos every week (with a break of 2 months when I moved house) and so far I have over 4500 views, 200 subscribers and nearly 150 hours of watch time on my channel! I hope to use my connections in the Stem Ambassadors network and also other educational content creators to grow my channel and increase the impact I have.

Sophie was voted the winner of the Americium Zone in March 2018. Here she writes about how her £500 prize money is being used to make materials such as 3D fossils to teach children about palaeontology.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

I decided to donate the money to the Scarborough Museums Trust, specifically to the Rotunda Museum who run both free and paid science workshops for primary and secondary school children. I wanted to donate to the museum because they are a small establishment who do not receive the same sort of funding as some of the larger museums. Furthermore, it is also the local museum in the town in which I grew up, so I thought it would be nice to give something back to the school communities in that area.

The money donated went towards funding 3D-printed fossils for them to use in their science (palaeontology) workshops so that some of the rarer and more valuable fossils that the children might not otherwise be allowed to handle could be used risk-free. Some examples of the fossils that have been 3-D printed include walrus and crocodile skulls. The project is only in the very beginning stages, but some of the fossils have been 3D-printed and more will be constructed over the next few months and years. Some scans of some of the museum’s most popular objects can be seen here: https://sketchfab.com/jim.middleton.

The I’m a Scientist experience was really fun. I learnt quite a lot about, not only my own knowledge, but that of the children over the two weeks. I learnt that they are really interested in black holes and climate change! Many of the children had really interesting and quite thought-provoking questions, some of which I did not know the answer to!

The prize money will help to fund the use of the 3D fossils in the workshop which I hope will continue to inspire future generations of children to get into the study of Earth Science, and keep them thinking about how the world around us is constantly changing in response to changing climates and environments.

Since the I’m a Scientist experience, I have given a talk in a sixth form in Yorkshire about my own research in Australia looking at the effect of Greenland ice melt on sea level in the 19th and 20th century and am hoping to get involved with soapbox science in June.

Elliot was voted the winner of the Bismuth Zone in June 2016. Here he writes about using the £500 prize money to bring students from across Yorkshire to carry out DNA analysis in labs at the University of York. 

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

We used the money to purchase consumables (DNA, reagents, disposable tips etc.) to allow groups of pupils from schools in North, West and East Yorkshire to spend a day at the University of York carrying out DNA fingerprinting. Pupils were presented with a sample of DNA from a “Crime Scene” and asked to match this sample to one of 5 suspects. The money allowed over 200 pupils the chance to experience carrying out practical work that they would not have otherwise been able to do in school as well as promoting bioscience as a career option. The activity was supported by the biology department at the University of York, who provided laboratory space and staff to run the events.

Senga was voted the winner of the Plutonium Zone in November 2017. She used her prize money to hold an activity day for school children at the University of Dundee, which you can read more about below.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

With the prize money I invited 120 children from areas near Dundee University an event called “Cell-ebration of Science”. Many divisions from the School of life sciences came together (Molecular Microbiology, Forensic Anthropology, Plant Science, Protein Phosphorylation to name just a few) to deliver a broad range of activities that ranged from messy fun to coding to ensure that all learning styles were accommodated for. There were things like learning about the bacteria that live in your tummy by making fake poo, badge making, making your genes jump and so much more. There were also drama workshops held that addressed scientific topics and questions in a very fun way, these proved to be a huge hit and it was great to have something a little different for the participants to do.

The activities were well established and all resources were available so there was no expense involved with delivering them, this meant that the prize money from IASUK plus generous additional funding from the University of Dundee outreach fund I could cover the full cost of transport for the participating schools and also provide a pizza lunch as a treat for everyone.

It was very important to me to ensure that this event came with no expense at all to the schools or carers of children – some schools do not have the funds to cover transport costs and parents may not be in a position to subsidise these. There can also be a huge stigma with packed lunches, particularly the ones that come for those that receive free school meals. I didn’t want anyone to be, or feel left out.

Feedback from the event was very positive, particularly regarding the diversity of activities available and I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to deliver such a successful event. I got so much from just being involved. One of the big things was that by chatting online to so many learners they all really helped me to think about my research and the way I do it, that’s helped me so much in my job! It also helped me to pick activities to do at the event because I learned about what they found interesting and things they wanted to learn about.

Chris was voted the winner of the Reproduction Zone in 2013.

I wanted to provide some resources for my local school as there were hardly any scientific books in the library (which weren’t textbooks). We had a little unveiling ceremony and the librarian was thrilled with the new materials. I did choose most of the books myself but I did get a little bit of help from her as I was concerned I would pick the wrong ones!

I hope the books help future students engage with science and show that science is not only be a career but also fun, interesting and important to understand. The kids all seem to have loved the new books and I think in general it was a safe investment!

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own science engagement, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

Liz was voted the winner of the Epidemic Zone in June 2017. Here she writes about using the £500 prize money to hold an event at her university to engage students with mathematics research and careers, and to develop a worksheet and interactive web-app.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

The majority of my prize money was used to fund an outreach event I helped develop, organise, and run on the 29th June 2018 at my workplace (the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester).

The event was created for female year 12 school children with the aim of inspiring them to pursue maths at university and find out more about research as a career. In order to provide accessible role-models for the attendees, all of the organisers, speakers, and workshop leaders were women working in research mathematics; women are under-represented in mathematics jobs and particularly in academic research positions in maths.

The day consisted of three talks and a selection of interactive workshops. My personal favourite talk was about female mathematicians throughout history. This was a great chance to give some airtime to lesser known female mathematicians who made great contributions despite often being faced with rather challenging circumstances.

The impact of this was perfectly summarised in feedback written by one of the attending students who said “hearing about women who have achieved something in worse conditions than we have nowadays has inspired me to handle being in a male dominated job”.

Try the SIR model app for yourself and make virtual people ill

As well as organising the day, I designed and ran a workshop on my research area of mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. I made a worksheet and interactive web-app for the students to use in order to gain an understanding of the SIR model: one of the most frequently used models in my research area.

My experiences on I’m a Scientist certainly helped me think about how to best describe my work to school students. I also got advice from friends who are secondary school teachers to ensure the material was at the correct level.

The feedback from both the students and their teachers about the event was very positive. A lot of the students found the day interesting and fun. I hope to make this an annual event, and we will build on constructive criticism given in the feedback, for example by letting students decide which workshops to attend in advance of the day and aiming it at year 10 students who are more likely to have not yet made decisions about university.

Designing and creating this web-app and worksheet required quite a large time commitment; in my experience as an academic doing outreach we are “funding rich” but “time poor”. Therefore, I aim to use these resources at further outreach events this year to make the most of the time I have invested.

Most of the spending was related to the Women in Research mathematics event described above, which also had funding from additional sources for lunch and the travel costs of speakers from beyond Manchester. Some of the prize money was also used to cover the travel costs of two speakers to the Databeers Warwick event held on 30th November 2017. I anticipate using the last bit of the prize money to fund my travel to future outreach events where I use my worksheet and web-app.

Duncan was voted the winner of the Uranium Zone in November 2017. Here he reports on using the £500 prize money to fund a new podcast about medical research, Not Exactly Rocket Science.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

Winning I’m a Scientist came with two immediate thoughts: “great, I won!”, and “oh no, now I have to make a podcast and I have no idea how to do that!”. I did some research and spent the money on recording equipment, hosting, and a cool domain name (notexactlyrocketscience.fm), then started to charm researchers into being interviewed for it.

The fan favourite ‘Best host impression of the thinking face emoji’ competition takes up the first 20 minutes of each episode.

It was pretty exciting when the first episode went live on the 1st of June, and it’s been really fun to learn so much about what people who work in my building are actually researching, and how that research gets done. Listen to all the episodes so far here.

As well as the podcast, I’ve been involved for about a year in another project called Circuits!, in which we’ve co-created teaching materials so that high school teachers can use our research to enthuse kids about science while they’re learning about light and sound.

I’m hoping to create a bit of a mashup at some point with an episode of the podcast all about Circuits!, answering questions from students who have used the tool. My experience in I’m a Scientist should be invaluable there.

Laura was voted the winner of the Rhodium Zone in March 2013.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

I set up a website (Generate Science) for school students to post blogs about current science topics and developed resources to help train the students. I was unable to find teachers who felt they had the time available to be the test classes for the platform, and then I moved to the US for a postdoc position. I still hope to eventually work on getting the website running when I return to the UK, by focusing on a local school so that I can run training in person for the first trials. As this did not go as expected, I decided to donate the remaining half of my prize money to an organisation I knew would immediately be able to make good use of it for outreach purposes, and so in 2016 I donated £250 to the Cambridge Earth Sciences Museum Time Truck team.

Dawn was voted the winner of the Thallium Zone in June 2016. Here she writes about using her £500 prize money to fund local community events called Fun Palaces at which she has run activities based around neuroscience.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

My original plan was to create a webcomic about being a scientist, trying in particular to focus on being a woman of ethnic minority. I’d drawn up draft comics, scribbled ideas into a notebook, but I never got the time to actually finalise the comic or build the website. I decided to donate the money to Fun Palaces, which is an annual event popping up at several locations in the UK. A Fun Palace is held by the community, for the community. It should be free, local, inclusive, and an opportunity to create a mishmash of arts and science (and much more). £500 went straight to Fun Palaces which will help fund running workshops, travel, support for local Fun Palace groups, etc.

I’ve been involved in running activities at the Brockwell Lido Fun Palace for 3 years in a row from 2014, and it’s been a blast being able to learn from the experience each year. The first year, we created a big brain on a board and invited the community to write memories into the brain and many people were really excited to find out we were actually neuroscientists.

Since then we’ve also run activities like dye chromatography and making brain models and all of these have piqued interest from the community asking about what we do, what our research is on – which was great!

Since I’m a Scientist, I was also involved in running a public engagement event at the Science Museum, with Alzheimer’s Research UK in March 2018. We ran many activities for both children and adults, such as making a neuron, memory games, showed them slides of real human brain tissue, and a lab skills station where participants could try and dissect brains (actually fruit!) and practise pipetting and changing cell media.

Alex was voted the winner of the Europium Zone in November 2014. Here he writes about donating his £500 prize money to the Barts Cancer Institute to train aspiring research scientists.

If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply

When I first entered I’m a Scientist I had already decided, if I won, that I would donate the money to the Barts Cancer Institute Science Training for Aspriring Research Scientists (BCI STARS). The STARS project is a scheme that everyone here at BCI is very proud of, and I wanted to do my small bit in supporting that. Having been asked by a lot of the children during the competition what I was planning to do with the money they all thought the scheme was brilliant and wished they had their own local version.

 From John Marshall – head of STARS programme the money was donated to…

BCI STARS- A programme to introduce school students to scientific research and to train PhD students in science communication.

In 2014, a group of Year 13 students from schools that historically had had relatively poor progression to university for their students, joined PhD students at Barts Cancer Institute, part of Queen Mary University of London, for the first Science Training for Aspiring Research Scientists (STARS) programme.  In small groups the students had a full-time one week tuition in basic cell and molecular biology techniques taught to them by PhD students. Thus students learned:

• How to correctly use micro-pipettes and automatic pipette guns
• Sterile tissue culture of cancer cells
• Biochemical analysis of cancer cells using SDS-PAGE and western blotting
• How to label biomarkers in cancer tissue using immunochemistry and analysis by microscopy
• How to purify, analyse and clone DNA
• How to run polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) of cheek cell DNA

Photo: BCI STARS

In addition the PhD students learned the type of language that is required to describe the scientific bases of techniques they use on a daily basis. The programme does cost money and for the first year we could not find any funding.  Thus I was thrilled when one of BCI’s PhD student’s, Alex Rhys, donated his £500 prize that he had won from I’m a Scientist, get me out of here which helped enormously to cover costs.

The experience of both the students and the PhD demonstrators (now referred to as DEMONS) was extremely positive and encouraged the continuation of the programme which now has had two dozen Year 12 students in both 2015 and 2016 and about 35 different PhD students participating. All the school students are identified by the charity ACCESS Work Placements who work directly with schools to give students a real work experience. A very exciting development is that two new STARS programmes, the Blizard STARS (also at Queen Mary University, run by Dr Cleo Bishop) and King’s STARS (at Kings College London, run by Professor Maddy Parsons) started in 2016 also with great success and we are keen for other institutions to develop their own STARS programmes. Thus Alex’s initial generous gift has helped make this happen and I remain extremely grateful to him for his generosity.

Photo: BCI STARS

All of those students from our first cohort who replied to our enquiries entered their first choice university. The courses included medicine, dentistry, physics, biomedical sciences and mining. STARS was a subject of discussion at the university interviews so we hope their experience helped in their success. Below are comments from several students taken directly from their feedback forms.  More information and photographs of our STARS programme can be found here. Contact me if you are interested in starting a programme at your university.

Students’ feedback on their experience of STARS

“ I hoped to gain more information on research science and also learn one of the basic skills needed to carry out the experiments, and this course has covered every expectation I had before starting”

“Speaking to the PhD students was really useful-treated me like an equal which helped me gain knowledge and confidence”

“I’ve thought research science was boring but after the programme I started to like research science as you get to work on your own projects and be independent and I’ve got to know that I actually like working in (a) laboratory”

“It made me realize that I can go to any university I like and I can do the course that I want to do”

“Whiteboard explanation sessions were really good and gave a sort of “school explanation”- a format we are used to and helped in understanding more”

 “Do you have any feedback on the teaching approaches used?” “Continue! Enjoyed every bit of it. I wish I could join again. Thank you.”