The University’s Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund Management Group is delighted to announce that a Public Engagement Prize has been awarded to Drs Timothy Rittmann and Saber Sami (Dr James Rowe’s lab, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the Clinical School).

They will be initiating an exciting project to engage the public, including GCSE and A-level school children, in the design of a novel magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment, and to produce a film about this project that highlights how this imaging technique is advancing our understanding of brain activity and behaviour. The outcome of this initiative will be presented next year as part of the Cambridge Science Festival 2015.

A separate Public Engagement award has also been made to Dr Bethany Dearlove (Dr Simon Frost’s lab, Department of Veterinary Medicine, School of Biological Sciences), who is developing a ‘learning is infectious’ kit of activities to be used with primary age school children emphasizing how genetic sequencing can be used to understand the spread of infectious disease.