🔍👨🏾🔬 Final Year BSc Project 👨🏾🔬🔍
⚠️⚠️⚠️*Caution - Science Ahead*⚠️⚠️⚠️
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| The fumehood I will be working in for the rest of the term. |
This terms marks the start of the final year project. I have been working with Dr. Andrew Ashley's group. It's been an honour to be able to work with leading researchers in the field of nitrogen fixation. Their research focuses on developing groundbreaking new catalysts (they speed up reactions) to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia.
Ammonia is an important starting material in agriculture (for making fertiliser) all the way to the fashion industry (involved in manufacturing nylon). The catalysts developed are very sensitive to air and moisture so I've learnt a whole new way of doing chemistry involving using liquid nitrogen and bring extremely careful not to allow any air into reactions. It has been an amazing learning experience even though reactions take almost five times longer to set up!
By the end of the 8 week project I will produce a 10-page literature review of current research in the area and an extended write-up of my investigation: Nitrogen fixation using Ruthenium based catalysts. Wish me luck 😥
👨🏾🎓 UCL Institute of Education 👨🏾🎓
Myself and Dami had the pleasure of having a meeting with Dr Stuart Tannock and James from citizens UK to discuss what how we could collaborate in improving a programme they had implemented the year before focusing on educating people around the issues faced by refugees.
With presents the opportunity to work with students from the course on achieving the goals of the education team; mainly delivering classes centred around migration in general. The aim of the project will be to encourage campaigning, best practice for schools and to teach students about issues faced by migrants.
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| Myself and Dami outside the UCL Institute of Education. |
This is a project I'm really looking forward to working on with the rest of the education team as it gives us a chance to expand our remit.
📣 Does Britain care about young people? 📣
It was great fun to be able to support our very own let us learn member, precious, as she spoke amongst other young activists on the panel at an event at SOAS designed to highlight and facilitate debate around challenges faced by our generation.
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| The panel of 'Does Britain care about young people?'. |
We were greeted with a radio play curated by one of the panel members on what it meant to be young, followed by two shirt films, one of which was produced by Precious. Her film was telling the story of Let I'd Learn and what we had achieved so far.
These were followed by some spoken word performances and a Q&A session. Questions quickly shifted to what teachers could do to inspire young people to take ownership of their own futures. It was interesting to say the least and refreshing to see so many young people banging together to get their voices heard.
Thank you once again for reading my blog post and I hope you are all sticking to your New Year's Resolutions!
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| A group selfie from this month's gathering. |
