Metabolight stand draws crowds at 2018 Big Bang Fair

The fair, which runs over four days, is the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths for young people in the UK, and upwards of 70,000 visitors attend each year, including thousands of children from schools across the UK.

The team’s stand was all about demonstrating, through fun, interactive activities, how medical physics and biomedical engineering save lives. Children and their teachers and parents were able to learn how we build devices to monitor the brains of sick newborns, measure their own brain activity and oxygen levels while solving mental arithmetic tasks, have their hands scanned to gain a better understanding of how near-infraredlight works, and fill up on gummy bears (while learning about light colours).

The stand was constantly busy and, at the end of the four days, the team had scanned over three hundred brains and hands.

Ilias Taschtidis, Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow and Head of the Multimodal Spectroscopy Group, who leads the Metabolight programme, comments: 'It was very exciting for the MetaboLight team to participate in the Big Bang Fair, to show and demonstrate to young people how our research supported by the Wellcome Trust is helping doctors to save newborn lives. I am very proud of the team, who took a short break from their very demanding research activities, to talk to young people and inspire the next generation of biomedical engineers and medical physicists.' 

Visit our website http://metabolight.org/ and follow us on Twitter @metabolight to learn more about us and which events we will be visiting next.