Inspiring Budding Engineers: Fiona Truscott hosts LIYSF at Biochemical Engineering

A group from the London International Youth Science Forum (LYISF) visited The Department of Biochemical Engineering at UCL to spend some time with Dr Fiona Truscott using some of the robotic systems to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. As part of Fiona’s work she is an active partner with UCL Engineering facilitating outreach activities to school students particularly with an emphasis on reaching underserved student potential students groups in engineering.  

LIYSF started in 1959 with the aim of giving young people from all over the world a deeper insight into science and its applications. Today LIYSF is a two week residential course, held in London for 500 young scientists aged 16-21 from more than 70 countries. As part of the 59^th forum this year, participants visited UCL Engineering and in particular Biochemical Engineering. The aims of the session are to raise awareness of Biochemical Engineering and its current and future impact in industry and wider society as well as demonstrate the abilities and utility of automation.

The session started by looking at what Biochemical Engineering is and its current impacts on the society and the world, through various case studies. This was particularly relevant to LIYSF 2017’s theme, Science – Making Life Better. This was followed by an hands on activity session, based on the application of automated techniques to biocatalysis, called “Robot Racing with GERTI”. The main feature of this session, and the part participants enjoyed the most, is the people vs robots race to create simple pictures using food colouring and 96 well plates.