DNA Midweek Recap

Hi all, Ben and Lily here once again and it's time for our midweek check in. We thought it'd be a good idea to post a little blog about what's been going on, at least for posterity's sake if nothing else.

Monday kicked off with a lovely warm welcome from Leigh and brief wave from us DNA Tutors before we were joined by both the inevitable tech issues (thankfully rapidly taken care of by Emma) as well as Oscar Marin and Tamara Al Janabi with a brief intro and background on themselves and the CDN.

Later we had a lovely icebreaker from Leigh followed by Aniqa who joined us from Widening Participation along with some KCL Ambassadors and had a big old chat about how to get into Uni, applications to medicine, foundation years, and answered some great questions on personal statements. Next up to the plate was Marina Yasvoina kicking off with a welcome to neuroscience before handing the baton to Jonny O’Muircheartaigh who talked about his work in looking at epilepsy with MRI. Marina subbed back in to take us through some cool interactive 3D neuroanatomy in the Allen Brain atlas before a sprint finish with group project work.

Tuesday morning found the DNA team chomping at the bit before Jess, Victoria and Matt from the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine gave a whistle-stop tour of stem cells and what these powerful techniques allow them to do with their research. We had some excellent questions from the students on glioblastomas and induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) which Victoria and Matt answered diligently. After a quick pit stop, we had a slam dunk of a session with Elaine on Neuroethics where we split into teams and discussed the role of AI. Next up we touched base with Juan Burrone who gave us a brief rundown of synapses, dendrites and all things small and neuron'y before leaving the ball in Richards court to talk about the philosophy of being a scientist. After he fielded some questions, it was off to some further project work in our groups to conclude this marathon of a day.

On Wednesday, we dived right into the science of Psychosis, with Q&As from each of the members of Gemma Modinos’ Lab. It was great to see so many students come to the session with questions ready to fire at the Modinos Lab. After that we got creative with Artist Izzy parker. We each tried our hand at modelling four basic emotions – happy, sad, angry, and scared, using different snacks such as chocolate and wasabi seaweed to help evoke these feelings. We ended our morning session with a very interesting range of models from everyone who participated, (have a look below for the models that were shared).

After our lunch break, we began our bumper Drosophila session, where Darren Williams explained the anatomy of flies and Connor Sproston talked about fly genetics. Students did well to guess what the genes ‘Dachshund’ and ‘Grim Reaper’ are involved in. Y12 students from the Judd school then did a fantastic presentation on their FlyLab Drosophila projects.

The week is flying by and we are fully ready for action for the last 2 days...