The Bloomsbury Festival is an annual celebration of the area’s creativity and the diversity of bright minds. The programme consisting of culture, arts, science, music, literature, performance, discussion, and debate has been inspired this year by the theme BREATHE which was presented in over 100 events over 10 days.
On the 22nd- 24th of October the ChromaDose Project attended this year’s Bloomsbury Festival, where our participation was hosted within University of London's Discovery Hub at Senate House.
Led by UCL's Adaptive and Responsive Nanomaterials research group and with colleagues from Vesynta, ChromaDose offered a range of fun science-related activities, which included making butterflies with felt pens, coffee filters and pipe cleaners while learning about chromatography. Visitors could learn by practical examples about the principles of fluorescence and how this is used for accurate quantification of chemotherapeutic drugs. We also presented our educational platform qTLC.app, which enables to conduct analytical chemistry with a tablet or smartphone. A pipetting robot provided insights on liquid handling processing.
Primary school classes visited the stall on Thursday and Friday and had a chance to talk to the researchers and learn about the ChromaDose Project and the important impact that the project aims to have on healthcare, i.e. enabling safe and personalised chemotherapy dosing in childhood cancer. On Thursday and Friday afternoon as well as all day on Saturday, the Discovery Hub was open to all members of the public, and numerous families with children came along to find out more about the ChromaDose project and the science behind.
Thank you so much for everyone who visited us at the ChromaDose stall! We hope to see you again next year at the Bloomsbury Festival 2023!
Author: Lisa Pfaffenrath