Public Engagement
As a group we take great pride and enjoyment in making our work as inclusive as possible. In the past three years we have increased our focus on STEM activities and public engagement; having several of our members accredited STEM Ambassadors and representing our research more within the university and to the general public. Many of our group members are involved in Pint of Science and we have recently just developed our own chemokine focused activity. Scroll down for some more information!
Please find out more about our public engagement on our Twitter and Blog!
Some of the Robocells team at explorathon
Alison and Gill talking at Pint of Science Glasgow events
Gerry recording promo material for the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation.
Address Coding for Robocells
By working closely with students from the University of Glasgow’s engineering department, we have developed our robocells public engagement activity. By using small robots designed to follow lines and respond to colour codes, we demonstrate how important chemokines are for directing cells around your body during an infection. We launched our activity at explorathon 2019 and if you're keen to see it in action, we will be running the activity in the Glasgow Science Centre on the 12th on March 2020!
STEM Ambassador Activities
Jelly Cells
Glasgow Science Centre - Meet the Expert!
As part of Glasgow Science Centre's Meet the Expert event, Gill, Paul, Chris and Alan teamed up with fellow researchers from the IIIs to host the "Neutrophils - Gotta Catch'm all!" event. They spent the weekend teaching young children and their parents about the role of neutrophils in antimicrobial defence and NETosis using games and a lot of glitter. It was a great experience and gave the CRG some great ideas about running our own event in the future!
Secondary Education
Every year we take three Advanced Higher Biology students into the lab to do their projects with members of the group between October and February. Given the nature of the work we do in our lab, the projects we create for the students are more diverse than those offered by the SQA and as a result allow the students to really apply their scientific knowledge.
We also take work experience pupils to let them experience science careers first hand.