Tag Archives: STEM

Buzz Aldrin: Space policy, cooperative efforts to Mars and the need to inspire future generations

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Buzz Aldrin is a retired US Air Force pilot, a former American astronaut and the second person to walk on the Moon, on July 21, 1969. He was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history.

A global space ambassador. Courtesy of the Buzz Aldrin Archive

A global space ambassador.
Courtesy of the Buzz Aldrin Archive

Upon returning from the moon, Dr Aldrin was decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American peacetime award.

Since retiring from NASA and the Air Force, Col Aldrin has remained at the forefront of efforts to progress human space exploration. On November 16, 2011, Dr Aldrin was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honour, along with the other Apollo 11 crew members, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, and Mercury Seven astronaut, John Glenn, for their significant contribution to society and exploration.

Dr Aldrin has also written eight books including the New York Times best-selling autobiography, Magnificent Desolation, released in 2009 before the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He has released best-selling illustrated children’s books, two space science-fiction novels and his most recent book Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration was published by the National Geographic Society in 2013.

“To realize the dream of humans on Mars we need a unified vision. We need to focus on a pathway to the prize.” These were the strident historic words articulated by Buzz Aldrin in July 2009 at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s John Glenn Lecture Series for NASA’s 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.  Five years on, and having very recently celebrated his 84th birthday, Dr Aldrin’s enthusiasm, ambassadorial work, resolute attitude and ideals are no less subdued.

Exciting developments in space science are coming thick and fast and showing notable progress. It is however, US President Barack Obama’s objective of a manned mission to Mars in his lifetime, preceded by a robotic landing on a real orbiting asteroid, that remains a most ambitious follow on to lunar robotic surface control by the US and the occupation of a jointly designed International Lunar Base.

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Pole of Cold: An intrepid look at winter with climate scientist and adventurer Felicity Aston

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Felicity Aston is a British adventurer, climate scientist and STEM advocate, who in 2012 became the  first woman to ski solo across Antarctica.  At 23, Felicity left the UK to spend three years living and working in the Antarctic as a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey at Rothera Research Station. On her return, she was part of the first all-female team to complete the Polar challenge, a 360-mile endurance race across the Canadian Arctic. A year later, Felicity led the first British women’s crossing of the Greenland ice-sheet. Since then she has gone on to lead numerous expeditions including the Kaspersky Lab Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition, the largest and most international women’s expedition ever to ski to the South Pole.

Felicity Aston

“Our comfortable thought about Antarctica as a static cold monolithic environment is over as we’re now seeing it as a living being that’s dynamic and producing change. Change that is being broadcast to the rest of the world, possibly in response to what the world is broadcasting down to Antarctica,” a glaciologist aptly sums up his observations of the changing landscape in Werner Herzog’s documentary on Antarctica ‘Encounters At the End of the World’.

This resonates with the British climate scientist and adventurer, Felicity Aston, who is very familiar with the global environmental issues that she says threaten our planet. She is also an advocate for promoting awareness and understanding.

Having this year taken part in a photo shoot for the Guinness Book of Records after becoming the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica, Felicity is now well under-way with her next major challenge.

Following Winter

Travelling 30,000km across northern Europe and Siberia over three months, Felicity and her three person team will chase winter to the Pole of Cold, the coldest place in the world outside of Antarctica. Here they will explore the social, cultural and physical effects of living in the most extreme climates, engaging with local communities and researching how they have adapted to life in sub-zero temperatures.

“The team will track the extreme weather through scientific and creative means, documenting the physical, human and cultural geography as we go along,” says Felicity. “We’ll be looking at the day-to-day reality of life in the harshest of conditions and hope to bring alive the fascinating local stories. There are so many curiosities around how for example you use an iced-over lake to heat a house or whether it is possible for temperature to rise with altitude rather than drop?”

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“Reaching Further” The Exscitec Project

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shreena.PNGThis week’s guest blogger is Shreena Patel, Scientific Projects Manager for Exscitec. In partnership with Imperial College Outreach,

they provide hands-on practical activities for students to raise aspirations in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).

Science is cool. Science is fun. If you’re anything like me, you love keeping up to date with the latest technologies and discoveries that emanate from the scientific world. However, trying to convince a less than enthusiastic 14 year old that a peak in the data from the Large Hadron Collider could possibly change Physics as we know it…well that’s slightly more challenging! The reality is that for a large number of students, science is simply not seen as fun or cool.

Recently I asked a group of year 6 students (10-11 year olds) “What is a scientist?” What appeared on the whiteboard was a disturbing cross between Doc Brown and Einstein. I was told by the students that the image depicted in the picture was concentrating hard on NOT blowing up the ‘potions’ in his lab and was about to invent something spectacular (hence the light bulb hovering over his head). The excitement in the room was so infectious that even I wanted to meet this amazing scientist drawn on my whiteboard.

Ask this same question of year 10 (14-15 year olds) and the image on the whiteboard becomes the stereotype of a boring, geeky individual stuck in a dingy lab all day. Despite some very hard working teachers, a lot of students at this age just don’t realise how vast the reach of STEM is in the real world.

As outreach providers for Imperial College, over the past 12 years, Exscitec has provided bespoke courses for school students of all ages and abilities. Whether it’s building robots, synthesizing compounds or discovering who committed murder most foul through forensic testing, we try to take STEM off the textbook page and into the real world. In a nutshell, we try give students that ‘wow’ factor that will change the way they look at STEM.

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With the new Reach Out Lab (ROL) at Imperial College, we are now able to connect with even more students throughout the year. Opened in 2010 and championed by Professor Lord Winston, Chair of Science and Society, this multi-purpose laboratory provides a year round teaching facility for young people and teachers. Exscitec’s CEO, Alan West, who is also the Director of the ROL, was recently awarded an MBE for services to STEM education. Speaking about his work, he says, “In recent years, my work, and that of the Exscitec team, has focused very much on the development of STEM enrichment activity connected with Imperial’s Reach Out Lab, the success of which is enabling us to develop more exciting initiatives in support of STEM education”.

One of these new initiatives is called Reaching Further, which is a program which allows school students the opportunity to work with PhD, MRes and Masters students from the Imperial College research community. The premise is simple: students get to speak to a “real scientist”, and in return, researchers are able to share their work and strengthen their public engagement portfolio.

By giving students the opportunity to work with these researchers, we are able to tackle one of the main issues facing young students studying science: the time it takes for scientific breakthroughs to make it into students’ textbooks. This disconnect is one of the major issues we are trying to overcome here at the ROL. So far we have worked with researchers from the National Heart and Lung Institute, the Energy Futures Lab, the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) to name but a few.

Sarah Lester, Energy and Mitigation researcher at the Gratham Institute for Climate Change, along with Dr Jeff Hardy and other colleagues from UKERC, recently led Energy Islands – a role play workshop where year 12 students (16-17 years old) negotiated a reduction in carbon emissions for their world. Talking about her work with outreach so far, Sarah says, “I think the outreach work has been going really well and has helped the students get involved with academics and research on climate change. The Energy Islands game has also given us great motivation and an excellent tool to work with under 18s and the public as part of our education and information sharing work. One of the best things was being reminded how passionate people can be about this area once they feel they can make a difference.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. When it boils down to it, students want to be spoken to, not at. Once they feel that someone is listening, you find that they have an awful lot to say. Whether it’s stem cells or solar cells, who better to talk to than those who are at the forefront of the field? As Claire Doyle, PhD student in Organic Chemistry put it, “It definitely added variety to my doctorate and has given me some great experience for the future. Plus it was very rewarding to see students so excited about what I did.”

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So to all those hard working researchers sitting reading this during a break from their next round of tests, I urge you to get involved in outreach in whatever way you can. One interaction can literally change a student’s whole outlook on a subject. Science becomes cool, science becomes fun and as a consequence back at school the attitude towards science learning changes too.

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With that, it’s time I return to my lab, where a group of year 9 students (13-14 year olds) from Watford are eagerly waiting to accuse me of murder based on some smudged fingerprints and some suspicious stains on my clothing… which may have tested positive for blood (rookie mistake!) I have been informed that I am going to be thoroughly interrogated after lunch…!

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If you’re interested in reading more about mentoring in science, the nature.com Communities team ran a recent Science Online NYC (#sonyc) discussion about “Reaching the Niches”. Links to our coverage, including a series of guest posts on other mentoring initiatives can be found here.