As part of the Public Engagement module UCL Biochemical Engineering’s Charnett Chau, Jas Kalayan, Maryam Hussain and Neil Forbes formed a group to run a stall at Manchester’s Science Spectacular event in October
“Our stall was called ‘Medicine in Bubbles.’ We demonstrated how
biochemical engineering is used in the formulation of drugs via an interactive
exercise – making boba sweets (bubble tea) which participates can taste. The
activity involved the children at the fair to make sodium alginate beads, we
encouraged them to think of how to make the “bubbles” uniform and spherical,
like the challenges we have in ensuring the encapsulation of medicine is
liposome is uniform and holds the correct dosage.
The activities were initially
just aimed at children from the age of 5 up to 15 but the parents were also
engaged with trying to understand the science behind the mini-experiment. Some
of whom asked us for the recipe such they can do at home. Our stall
attracted approximately 200 children to participate, their parents had a taste
of their creations too.” Charnett Chau, December 2017
