STEM Insights day - Maths and Lungs

On the 25th June BIOREME participated in a STEM insights day at the University of Nottingham. We hosted 3 X 45 minute workshops for a total of 80 year 9 students from Bluecoat Trent Academy. We started the workshop with a quick quiz to engage the students and to find out what they knew about lung disease in the UK, we then introduced the idea of applying maths to problems in medicine and ran through an example of a model. Following this, we set the students an interactive task to use their analytical and persuasive skills.

Dr Carl Whitfield ready to present at the first student workshop

We set the students the task of being a funding proposal review panel. They were split into 4 groups and each group had to review a funding call and decide whether they would fund the project. If they would, they had to convince the rest of the room to allocate their funding to the project. The proposals were on the theme of applying modelling to understand the impacts on lung health and they covered wildfires, impact of air pollution on a developing foetus and micro and nano plastics.

The students did a fantastic job of understanding the proposals and (against the brief!) coming up with some very creative, out the box solutions the problems in the proposals.

Dr Carl Whitfield presented his career journey at the end of the workshops prompting questions like “ What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this job” and “What does a typical day look like for you”.

In the final session Anne Canning joined a careers panel where we discussed our career routes, played fact or fiction and answered a range of questions.

Image of the Careers Panel in the final session including Anne Canning, the BIOREME Project Manager

Many thanks to Helena French who organised the event and invited us to participate.