Present: Sara, Olof, Joanne, Bhoomi, Claire, Crystal
1, Family STEM Night @ Oakgrove Primary School. We discussed our next upcoming event which will take place on April 25th. We will run our #UnsungHeroines chromatography activity in a workshop classroom setting for pupils and parents attending Oakgrove’s STEM night. We’ll be taking along our quiz – kindly put together by Amy & Imogen – and hopefully be able to hand out some prizes to out family scientists. Claire, Bhoomi, Rhona and Sara have so far volunteered for the event.
2, What’s next? As Oakgrove’s STEM night is our last event currently in the calendar we are looking for new outreach opportunities for the last months of spring and of course for the summer! Suggestions included the Anniesland Fayre, local Highland Games, Glasgow Mela, West End Festival as well as visits to schools or GirlGuiding/scout groups. Claire has connections to Rainbow & Brownie groups that could be visited with a variety of activities and we also have science teachers from Cleveden Secondary School interested in more educational activities we could put together for older children. We’d also like to visit MoSSFest and the Midlothian Science Festivals again this year. MoSSFest will be in Mugdock Park yet again – a location conveniently close for our Glasgow-based group of science enthusiasts!
3, Activity development. As a development of the smell-aspect attached to the chromatography activity and as a branching out into the genetics of taste we had an idea to investigate whether paper strips can be found that people can taste and produce various results depending on their genes. Bhoomi suggested that strips exist where people, depending on their genes, can either taste bitterness or nothing when tasting the paper strip. This could be a good tie in with our introduction of geneticist Barbara McClintock as an #UnsungHeroine following the completion of her postcard.
4, Twitter heroines. We’re constantly working on becoming more active online and we’d like to work with out #UnsungHeroines theme. Lately we have been posting about historical female scientists but we’d like to branch out and try out a format with more current females researchers. We could make profiles either on the blog or Twitter for women scientists and try to grow our Twitter audience while also highlighting the massive contributions to science by amazing ladies. Suggestions from the meeting include Tansy Hammarton (who recently gave the Peter Wildy Prize Lecture at the Microbiological Society conference in Birmingham), Sarah Cleaveland (One Health champion based at the UoG Vet Campus), previous female Nobel Prize winners (not unsung, but semi-sung!) & Poppy Lamberton (and students). Most of our own contacts seem to be Glasgow-based and working in the life sciences, but it would be great to find female engineers or more early-career researchers to profile. The NERD group could be a great resource here, or perhaps we can even start with our own group members?
5, Pint of Science. Claire would like everyone to come and support her (with Poppy Lamberton and others) on May 15th at the Record Factory. With the title “Infectious invaders must die” it promises to be an educational riot!
The next meeting will be Saturday May 12th, 12 noon at Starbucks Byres Road.