The Wilton-Ely group is actively involved in outreach activities, for example, at the Great Exhibition Road Festival and at Imperial College Fringe and Lates events. This all started with a stand presenting on CO sensing at the Imperial Festival 2014 and continued at the Imperial Design Fringe event, where we showcased our work on toxic gas detection, and at the Atoms Family Fringe event. Most recently, a PhD student in the group, Faysal Farah, presented his work on 'Lighting up cancer with nanoparticles' at the 'Tiny Science' Imperial Lates event in 2022 (below, image by B. Foster).
Faysal and Sean McCarthy also hosted students, Samira and Michael, from Heathland school in West London in the summer of 2022. Funded by a grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry, they worked on projects in the lab based on the recovery of metals for use in catalysis and semiconducting polymer nanoparticles for medical imaging.
Imperial-UCL PhD student, Adila Islam volunteers as part of the operations team of Bridging The Future which is a charity run by members of the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) that provides support to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Adila also helped to run a UCL-LCN summer school last year and is part of their mentoring scheme.
James Wilton-Ely is a STEMNET Outreach Ambassador and regularly gives talks in primary and secondary schools.
We have exciting plans for expanding these activities and further details will be added soon.