We are happy to be again be involved in the Sheffield Week of Science. Building on the success we had last year with our hosted event, CISTIB expanded our contribution by offering events for schools and colleges. We are happy to say that two local educational institutes took us up on the offer, Pennistone Grammar School and Chesterfield College. The team from a very broad range of backgrounds; consisting of Research Students and academics was led by Mohsen Farzi a Research Student. Our dedicated Administration Team and Academics helped to ensure that everything went ahead smoothly.

As this was our first year delivering a week of science event at schools, the organisation team developed a pair of short talks and a demonstration that allowed the students to interact with our software and try their hands at practical research. These session were supported by a seminar delivered by one of the Groups Academics on their research and the group as a whole. At our visit to Chesterfield College Dr Ali Gooya presented a talk on machine learning and its application in medical research. For the two talks research students Mohsen Farzi and Marina Costantini talked about their experiences in CISTIB. Research students Matthias Lange and Isaac Castro lead the practical demonstration. Our audience were students from the nursing course ran at Chesterfield and anyone else that was interested. The event went well with the attendees getting involved and asking in depth questions.

We then took our event to Penistone Grammar School were we presented to the physics sixth form sets. At this event Dr Zeike Taylor presented a seminar on CISTIB and personalised medicine. The team presenting was the same however at this event another research student Santiago Coelho presented his experience at CISTIB instead of Marinna Costantini. We had an excellent response with the students toughly engaging with the talks and the demonstration.

The hosted event used the framework as last year but taking advantages of new equipment available to our group and the lesson learnt from last year to develop our event. The main presentation was given by Dr Zeike Taylor. The team were impressed with the audience getting involved and engaging with the demonstration. We were very happy to have taken part in the week of science and will be looking to get involved again next year and taking what we have learnt forward to improve our outreach work. If you would like to know more please get in touch.