Meet-up July 7/7/2018

Present: Crystal, Iz, Sara, Claire, Gillian

1, Events. All our events are ganging up on us this fall, but we’ll be nice and refreshed after a bit of a break and ready to go with new activities by then! We have the Midlothian Science Festival in Sep/Oct – Amy and Imogen are running point on the organisation of that. MoSSFest is happening September 30th in Mugdock Country Park – Claire is organising a joint venture with the CVR here. Bang Goes The Border is the first one coming up on September 22nd – Carla, Iza, Gillian and Crystal have volunteered for this event. Iz will bring Stan and JC in her car so will have one space left. Gillian will also have a car to take people as it is quite far away.

We thought for this event we’d change up the Unsung Heroines activity a little as we already did the Tu YouYou chromatography there last year. The plan is to premiere our newly designed Barbara McClintock post card (courtesy of Rhona, Carla & Lara) and put together a more genetics-based activity as she was a famous geneticist. Isabel will order taste strips and buy sweets for the poor people with genes for taste strip bitterness. We’ll also look into buying taste-changing berries and put together something about the taste of coriander and tastes/smells changing during pregnancy. Isabel will work on using our molecule building sets to put together some tasty molecules and guides for building them and her and Carla will also put together some posters and booklets on the biochemical/genetic side of taste.

2, Funding. Our grant money from the BCS is finally running low so we need to think about applying for some new funding. If we decide to expand into the new genetics activity it might be good to look up offers from the Genetics Society. We can also reapply for the Biochemical Society grant as long as it’s not in Isabel’s name. I’ll look into other funding opportunities for the next meeting.

The next meeting will be on Monday Aug 27th at 5.30. I’ll book the Starbucks conference room and we’ll have a little activity/event prep meeting!

3, New Chapter Lead. A new Chapter Lead is needed for ScienceGrrl Glasgow from October – any volunteers welcome!