Bristol...the best heat ever??
Bristol NESTA FameLab was ear-marked as the best talent that NESTA FameLab has seen ever! The regional final saw 10 of the top competitors during the day perform at their best. Taking on the hints that were given in the mini-MasterClass by communications expert Malcolm Love, the top 10 produced a spell binding showcase of research happening around the UK.
The Bristol Regional winner was Zoe Schnepp who spoke about 'growing' nanowires. Zoe is a final-year postgraduate chemistry student at the University of Bristol and for the last three years, she has being growing nanowires of electronic materials using nothing but heat and seaweed. Outside of the lab, Zoe gives talks and demonstrations to school groups for the Bristol ChemLabS outreach project, encouraging students to look at chemistry in a completely different way. Zoe loves to ride her mountain bike but can also be found adventure racing, climbing mountains and running half marathons dressed as a mouse...
The competition was so close that three ‘wildcards' were chosen from this heat. They were Kelly Conway, who spoke about regulatory stringency of pharmaceutical production, Alistair Linsell who captivated us with the varied movements of his body in first explaining heroin addiction and then the receptors in the brain and how this relates to drug effectiveness. The final wildcard, Ian Lewis explained how a resonance wave travels through a material causing multiple breaks further down the line rather than just a single break, which is useful in materials science for application to buildings and aeroplane wing design. He also captured audience attention in his audition when revealed he was wearing a ‘chrono-bra'....
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Dr Ian Lewis (pictured above), lives in Cardiff and works for the Cancer Charity Tenovus as Research Manager. Before joining Tenovus spent 4 years working towards my PhD, looking into one of the reasons why some breast cancers stop responding to common therapies, spread and become more aggressive. Currently Ian administers the charity's research funding and help manage the our public relations and campaigns. Ian has always really enjoyed talking to people about science whether at resarch conferences or in the pub, and one of his favorite aspects of my current job is getting out and telling people about the latest advances in cancer research.
Outside of work, Ian tries to see as much music as he can, and plays in a band called Wolves of St August. If the science thing doesn't work out he plan to dominate the world of lo-fi rock instead.
Kelly Conway (pictured above) is originally from London and have lived in Bristol for about 7 years. She studied Chemical Engineering at Loughborough University and now works as a Senior Process Engineer for a pharmaceutical company, within Research and Development. (Which means that I develop pharmaceutical manufacturing processes from lab scale to bulk manufacturing scale). She worked for a year in industry at Weetabix, so she knows how to make a mean chocolate minibix and spent quite a while getting covered in molten ReadyBrek! Her interests include swing dancing, music and theatre and running Rainbows.... little 5 year old Girl Guides.
Alistair (pictured above) is from the village of Painswick in Gloucestershire and is currently in the 2nd year of his undergraduate chemistry degree at Durham University. He loves how almost all of chemistry can be explained by positive and negative charges which lead to magic happening! Despite having a reasonable understanding of chemistry and science he can't seem to make porridge in a microwave without it exploding. Aside from chemistry his interests include the theatre, improvised comedy and martial arts.