Pint of Science - Our Body - May 2022

Pint of Science is an annual event held globally to showcase local research to the community in a relaxed environment e.g. pub. It is a volunteer led initiative to allow the public to discuss science with the researchers, despite having no prior knowledge or background in the subject. MoSMed CDT Doctoral Researcher Victoria Burge tells us about what it was like to organise a Pint of Science event on 'Our Body’ in Newcastle. 

This year, Newcastle held events for the Planet Earth, Tech Me Out and Our Body research themes. I was an Event Organiser for ‘Our Body’, where myself and 2 others were responsible for designing the format of the nights, finding appropriate speakers, and securing an accessible venue. This involved several meetings with the ‘Our Body’ group and the Newcastle team where the City Co-ordinators would guide and support us.

Once we had secured The Town Wall for our venue, we began to design each night. The aim was to showcase as much research within the scope of ‘Our Body’ as possible, therefore we decided a night per topic featuring Microbiology, Drug Discovery and Cancer Research. Finding speakers was one of the challenges, as a first-year PhD student I haven’t build up a large network across each theme. However, I wanted to showcase the research within MoSMed as the research themes within MoSMed (understanding of disease biology, identification of new therapeutic targets, new approaches to the discovery and development of novel therapies) completed the ‘Our Body’ research theme perfectly. With help from Twitter, the MoSMed cohort and word of mouth we finally managed to secure 6 speakers across each of the nights. Then all that was left was to design the titles and summaries for each night prior to the commencement of ticket sales.

Tickets for all the nights were sold out before the event, which was a great feeling. The day of the first event soon approached, the AV equipment was all set up and we were ready to host our first night ‘Are microbes and metals the future of medicine?’ featuring talks from PhD students Lauren Beck ‘I’ve got a gut feeling about this: shaping the microbial world within’ and Samantha Firth ‘Copper - our saviour from germs that evade antibiotics?’. The night was very successful, and we were able to give out goodie bags to the audience provided by the Microbiology Society.

The second night ‘An insight into the future of Drug Discovery’ was also very successful and featured a talk from Olivia Gittins (Cohort 1) ‘Structure-based drug discovery: A fast-track to clinical success?’ where she discussed the benefits of structure-based drug design and its pivotal role in drug development, benefitting patients. Additionally, Olivia mentioned the advancement of artificial intelligent technologies such as AlphaFold to expedite this drug discovery process by improving the protein folding problem, essential to solving a protein structure. Olivia said Pint of Science was a great opportunity to ease back in to in-person talks after 2 years of Zoom presentations, and she benefited from the relaxed environment. Our second speaker was Ben Cree (Cohort 2) with ‘How to use supercomputers and machine learning to design anti-viral drugs’, he gave us a whistlestop tour through how drug molecules can be designed, simulated and scored, with the only cost being the amount to power the computer. This is a much better solution of the highly expensive and lengthy alternative of using a wet chemistry approach. These supercomputers have already made a monumental impact in both industry and academia. It was great as a fellow MoSMed researcher, to see the progress of both Olivia and Ben and was a great insight into their research projects.

Our final night was ‘The Evolution of Cancer Research’ which featured talks from Gerald Hysenaj from the Newcastle University spin-out company GlycoScoreDX with his talk ‘Translating research to clinical practice: Understanding prostate cancer diagnosis.’ This was followed by Dr Debbie Hicks from NU Cancer, which discussed ‘The Goldilocks approach to childhood cancer treatment’ which involved a fun activity of hook a duck to determine our fate depending on our risk group (via the duck) and therefore how much radiotherapy we would have to be exposed to, in the form of 0-4 toxic waste sweets.

Each night also featured a general knowledge quiz on KwizzBit that was held nationally each night, where we featured 13th in the country and the 2 winners in each pub received a Pint of Science pint glass. Overall, it was a great opportunity to be involved in the organising and hosting of each event and I can’t wait for Pint of Science 2023. I would like to thank the sponsors, my team (John Clark-Corrigall and Tejal Jain), the city co-ordinators (Diana Githwe and Elmira Alimohammadzadeh), MoSMed for highlighting this opportunity and all the speakers and attendees. Do get involved next year, whether speaking, organising or just attending. It was great to see so many insightful discussions with each speaker and was truly a great 3 evenings.

Last modified: Thu, 19 May 2022 21:17:17 BST