The annual Cheltenham Science Festival is for people of all ages who want to discover more about the wonders of the everyday world, mysteries of the universe and cutting-edge technology. The Festival hosts hundreds of free family-friendly activities, while the UK’s science community gathers to share their latest ideas in thought-provoking and entertaining ways.
This year marked the 21st Festival and staff and students from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences travelled down to Cheltenham to showcase our research through hands-on activities as part of the Festival’s Discover Zone. The Discover Zone is a free, interactive space which over the course of the festival was visited by over 7,000 school children and thousands of members of the public.
Our activities for the week were all themed around the work we’re doing here in Liverpool to identify and treat disease. For the first half of the week, we invited visitors to have a go at making their own microbes using craft materials, which they could then take home in a petri dish! Through this activity, people could learn more about the microorganisms that are all around us, the positive and negative affects they can have on our body, and work that we’re doing to try to understand more about them.
The second half of the week saw the team from the Liverpool NIHR Clinical Research Facility attend the festival to talk about their work on the COVID-19 Agile Trial and clinical trials more generally. They were exploring how drugs get to where they need to go in the body, and had a model body that people could put back together and also a body apron (!), showing all the different organs. The team also highlighted different techniques that might be used during clinical trials such as blood pressure measurements and tear sampling, and even challenged people to have a go at a peak flow meter and see how their score compared to everyone else on the day!
The whole team really enjoyed sharing our research with thousands of people as part of this busy and exciting Festival and look forward to hopefully being involved in future events!
To find out more about our Public Engagement events, please follow us on @LivUniEngageHLS on Instagram and Twitter.
