April 8th 2025:
Congratulations to Eulalie Lafarge, postdoctoral researcher and MedTrain+ fellow and Ankita Pramanick, doctoral candidate at CÚRAM on devising and delivering two innovative courses for primary school and secondary school students at University of Galway’s Youth Academy. Students from across Ireland attended the 6 weekend courses and were introduced to some of the most exciting medtech research happening in Ireland.
Ankita’s course – ‘Biomedical Engineering : 3D Bioprinting’ brought secondary school students on an exciting journey to create living tissue in the lab. This amazing technology could help in organ transplantation, drug testing, and disease research. Students created a podcast about their experience and also had a field trip to CÚRAM’s SUPERHUMAN exhibit at Galway City Museum.
Eulalie’s course was devised for primary school students, entitled – How Science and Engineering can heal our bodies? – explored how the human body works, how we treat illnesses and included an introduced to biomaterials, which can be designed to help the body to heal itself. Students had a field trip to Galway Atlantaquaria to see the CÚRAM Marine Meets Medtech exhibit and spent a morning as forensic scientists at a murder investigation involving a banana DNA extraction!
Well done to all of the brilliant students who took part in both programmes – future scientists for sure! These two projects will be included in an open-schooling EU programme called STE(A)M Learning Ecologies – made up of nine partners running 100 of these projects in 2024/5 to show the benefits of engaged learning outside a classroom set-up.
Ends.
