On Tuesday 31st October representatives from Nuffield came to the academy to talk to Year 12 students about placements next summer.  This follows on from the amazing success last academic year when five students were successfully accepted onto the highly competitive Nuffield Research Placement programme. The programme gave students the opportunity to work alongside professional scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians for 4 – 6 weeks over the summer holidays. The five students, now in Year 13, completed their research and then presented their findings and results to the Nuffield foundation during a celebration event before half term. This is a truly fantastic achievement and really highlights how amazing ourstudents are.  Please find details of their successes below.

“For my Nuffield research project I was asked to write a 2000 word report on a topic of my choice. I chose to research personalised medicine and the genetic code. My report was about how the genetic code effects personalised medicine and the viability of personalised medicine. My research focused specifically on the drug Herceptin which is used in breast cancer therapy for patients which show high levels of the protein HER2. My research about personalised medicine in breast cancer consisted of how Herceptin works and the process by which healthcare specialists decide whether Herceptin will produce optimal results with minimal side effects for a patient or not. I then had to weigh up the advantages, setbacks and ethical implications of personalised medicine. I received support with writing my report from various University lecturers.”

Mahfuza Choudhury

Nuffield research placement offered me the chance to work alongside professionals to write up a report of a solution which used science to solve a real world problem.  For the first assignment, I produced a power point which showed my career aspirations into STEM related subjects. For my PowerPoint I talked about mechanical, aeronautical and chemical engineering for my aspirations where mechanical engineering was my main choice. I used SMART  and DOTS to show my future plan of what I’m going to accomplish to come closer to my target goal and how I will assess myself which would show if any progress are made.  For the second assignment, I had to choose a field related to a STEM subjectchoose a sub question within that field and write up a report of it. For my report, I chose nanotechnology as the main topic and subtopic was “how can nanotechnology improve the lives of poorer people”. My reports mainly focused on nanobots, tiny machines controlled by an exterior source. These nabobs would reach places previous machines wouldn’t be able to reach. I mainly talked about nanobots clearing polluted water; curing cancer with a high success rate and reducing the cost of the process; and nanobots delivering medicine to certain parts of the body and place them around the human body to create a network of them which will allow them to pick up any weird activities within the human body. However, I also talked about the ethics in using these nanobots which mainly talked about religious beliefs.”

Munirul Hoque

I was working at the King’s College London alongside a research assistant with a PhD in Chemistry. Our work involved planning and carrying out new reactions as part of research for drug discovery. The placement was 10% independent research and learning new chemical mechanisms, roughly 75% lab work, conducting experiments and familiarising myself with new equipment such as, rotary evaporators, mass vacuum pumps, ultrasonic water baths, fractional distilling columns, NMR and mass spec machines. The other 15% involved data analysis using TLC and interpreting spectra produced by NMR and LC/MS. Much of what was needed to learn correlated with what I will be studying in A2 chemistry this year, and my experience really polished my lab skills and improved them even further. Working in a professional lab with my brilliant supervisor, creating risk assessments from scratch and picking up new lab skills, means that I can apply all this to practicals beingcarried out as part of our curriculum. Most importantly, I gained insight into the life of research in chemistry and really, really enjoyed it. I only wish it had lasted longer!”

Jasmin Begum Kamal

Lilyma Begum: successfully completed a placement at Imperial College London looking into Synthetic Biology

Anisha Noshin: successfully completed placement at the Chemistry Group looking into the impact of faking and socially desirable responding in psychometric assessments.

We are very hopeful that we will have a large number of student applicants once again and more success stories to celebrate in the future.