Alumna Sheena Doshi takes vaccine outreach to her old school in India

Sheena's passion for vaccines as a tool for preventative healthcare led her to graduate with a degree in Bioprocessing of New Medicines (Business and Management) BSc in 2024. During her degree, she gained a great deal of knowledge about vaccines, how they are manufactured, how they work, and the challenges of manufacturing them, and this led her to want to share with a wider audience, starting with young people. She felt there was a lack of public awareness about vaccines and wanted to challenge that gap. 
 

(Photo of Sheena talking to members of a housing association in Pune, India)

Working with mentors in UCL Biochemical Engineering to engage with schools

Her first step was to reach out to one of her tutors, Dr Steffi Frank, to talk about setting up an outreach project. Steffi put her in touch with Dr Stephen Morris and Dr Lodovica Vaiarelli on the Vax-Hub team. One of the key aspects of the Vax-Hub project has been to engage with schools to educate students about vaccines, and they invited Sheena to observe a session and see how they structure their activities.  

Sheena explained “I took the structure that Stephen and Ludo have spent a long time working on and used it as a starting point to put my own plan together, beginning by reaching out to my own school where I was head girl and pitched an idea to the principal, now director, setting out my idea explaining what the benefits would be to them and how it would work.”  

Engaging with her school and reaching out to young people in India

Her first session was with the IGCSE-1 students at Symbiosis International School in Pune, where she outlined:

• How vaccines train the immune system
• The different types of vaccines (from mRNA to live attenuated)
• How our COVID-19 vaccines were developed so quickly
• What is biochemical engineering?
• ... and more!

(Photo of Sheena talking to members of a housing association in Pune, India)

In a wider initiative to make vaccine science accessible to all, Sheena also ran sessions with attendees from a low-income background in the local community and housing society residents.

What's next for Sheena?

Sheena recently sent out a survey to gather data on the impact of the project. The initial feedback was very positive: “Several pupils are considering careers they’d not even known existed – most did not know what a biochemical engineer does. It was also good to give them an insight into what it’s like to study a degree and go to university.” She said.  

“One big surprise was how little some people actually know about what a vaccine even is. Some are scared, so it was great to explain how a vaccine trains your own immune system to fight disease using a range of analogies and techniques. That was great.”  

Since doing the project, Sheena has felt inspired to look for roles that involve engagement and communication while being part of the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. 

We're pleased to say that Sheena has been appointed to a role here at UCL Biochemical Engineering and will be working over the summer as a member of the Vax-Hub team.

Sheena said, “The degree was very helpful when carrying out this project as it developed my critical thinking; learning how to write a business plan was great training, especially Eli’s (Prof. Eli Keshavarz-Moore) module. That kind of grounding in a thinking process enabled me to take my idea and then actually make it happen. Without the practice I had on the course, I would not have had the knowledge or confidence, and the project we undertook to design our own vaccine production facility was very useful.” 

These were her key takeaways from the experience:

• Simple, clear communication is everything - breaking down complex concepts for non-experts is often tougher than it seems, but it is an essential skill.
• Misinformation is real - questions from students reinforced just how crucial public education is in building trust in vaccines.
• Lollipops are an underrated engagement tool - contrary to what I thought, high school students are still just as excited by lollipops, an excellent way to create an engaging, competitive environment!

Find out more

• The Vax-Hub at UCL Biochemical Engineering
• Bioprocessing of New Medicines (Business and Management) BSc
• Undergraduate programmes at UCL Biochemical Engineering
• Sheena Doshi on LinkedIn
• Dr Steffi Frank
• Dr Stephen Morris