 Youth Science Forum LOSF virtual webinar. We are really excited to have you here with us today. My name is Richard Myhill and I'm the director of LOSF. This webinar will look to introduce you to LOSF. Based on our experience and what our students tell us, we believe LOSF is a very special event. One that is a sum of many in-person experiences that take place over two weeks each summer in London. There is no way that the experience can be replicated online and nor are we trying to do that here today with this virtual session. What we're hoping to do with this webinar is to give you a small taster to introduce you to LOSF, give you access to some of our content and speakers and wet your appetite for 2021. We are as prepared as we can be for this session with the whole team working together with the help of UCL, all with good broadband internet and backup plans in place. However please do bear with us in case of any technical issues. It is after all our first time and we're bringing this session to you today from five different locations across three countries. Don't worry we are recording this session and we'll be releasing the recording afterwards. We've also found that videos can be a little tricky on Zoom. Today we have four short videos each around two minutes long. Please bear with us if they don't play well for you and please please please stay in the session. We will be posting these videos that we play today on the webinar page on our website for you to view afterwards. We are really excited with our first virtual session today as we're expecting 450 attendees joining from 70 countries. We're delighted that you've already been introducing yourselves on the chat function. During this session we really would like your input. Please from now onwards use the question and answer function at the bottom of your screen for any questions rather than the chat. Please ask a question no matter how small it is please ask us. The LISF team are here moderating the call and we'll answer some questions directly as well as passing questions to Professor Clare Erwell and myself to answer at the end of the webinar in our dedicated question and answer segment. Please make sure to send your questions in nice and early. LISF was established in 1959 and we have had 61 live editions taking place annually. We're really looking forward to our in-person 60 second edition taking a place again next summer. We will of course be ensuring the safety of all but our event is about young people coming together from across the world to learn about science and engineering and share cultural understanding. Our mission from 1959 remains the same today. So the internet and virtual events are super important for our modern life but the value of face-to-face events like LISF are really vital. We hope over the course of the next hour to show you why. Seeing science in action being in the same room as pioneering scientists with fellow passionate students is really key. LISF equips our students with the foundation and experience of international cooperation which sets our students up for both their own careers but also their place in the world as a global citizen. I have here with me today the reports and the programs from the very first forums in 1959, 1960 and 1961. We are still associated with many of the science organizations, universities and schools today that we were with in the beginning. We combine this rich prestigious heritage including founding royal patronage, UK government support and UNESCO patronage with the very latest developments and the most cutting-edge scientific and engineering research. This we deliver through our incredible speaker program with the diverse range of international and highly respected researchers and leaders addressing LISF. This is combined with visits to world-leading university departments, laboratories and international research centers. So what is LISF? Each year we welcome 500 students age 16 to 21 years old from also 70 countries as we have today. These students apply to attend our 15-day residential science enrichment program which is held at Imperial College London and the Royal Geographical Society. As always, LISF will aim to cover a broad range of STEM subjects and in 2021 we have the underlying theme of science for humanity. As you can see here on the slide we have preliminary lectures, specialist lectures and visits where all our students contain in the program to suit their STEM interests. Students also have the opportunity to present a scientific research project if they don't want. We have a wide range of cultural activities and social events as well as optional science scene tours across the UK and in London. We provide all our participants with 14 nights accommodation in South Kensington Central London and all meals and travel to the program event are provided throughout. I would like now to show you a short video to get a flavour of what this all looks like. LIYSF is a two-week residential student event held annually which attracts 500 of the world's leading young scientists aged 16 to 21 years old from more than 70 participating countries from all around the world. LIYSF is so important because it brings together young and passionate minds who care about science. There are a lot of different mindsets, there are a lot of different ideas, you actually gain a lot. The privilege that we have to be here to go into world class, classroom facilities and to hear from lecturers from all over the world to connect with like-minded people is a phenomenon. I was really lucky to attend the forum as a student but I came here and heard for the first time about a topic of medical physics. What the forum gave me was my career. LIYSF attracts the highest caliber of international students including Nobel laureates, leading scientists, dignitaries and industry ironies who lecture throughout. Students participate in a widely varied cultural program to learn about each other and share traditions. Our mission is to give young people from all nations a deeper insight into science for the benefit of all mankind whilst enabling our students to develop lasting international friendships. This is LIYSF. Join us in moving science forward with the thinkers of the future. This video gives you a snapshot of the in-person experience. Don't worry if the video didn't play well for you. We will be posting them today on our website as I mentioned. So in order to attend LIYSF we have the following requirements. Students must be aged 16 to 17 years, 16 to 21 years old, passionate about science and engineering and fluent in English. The participation charge covers all the costs for the 15-day program except the travel airfare to London. Our students are the lifeblood of LIYSF. Many attend as winners of national and international science competitions and fairs or are selected by national organizers and ministries of education. However, many of our students apply to attend directly. We are looking for interested independent students to apply to join the 62nd LIYSF taking place on 28th of July until the 11th of August 2021. Applications are open right now on our website. Let me tell you that you will be in good company if you wish to attend LIYSF next year. LIYSF alumni go on to have incredible international careers and change the world. You might have seen we have been releasing some of our alumni stories over recent weeks on social media for you to see for yourself and we'll be continuing to do this over the coming weeks. However, I'm delighted to say we have two short alumni videos that we'd like to share with you now. I'd like to pass over to Ojali, our engagement and program manager, to introduce both these videos and herself. Hi everyone, my name is Ojali and I'm from Nigeria. I am a clinical pharmacist currently working in England. I was a participant back in 2006 and I became a staff member with subsequent years as well as becoming a visiting speaker over the last few years. LIYSF is truly, truly, truly amazing and it completely changed my perspective on science and increased my love for science to be honest and I had such an amazing time making lifelong friendships with people I'm still in contact with today. I'm now delighted to introduce to you Simran, who is a 2014 alumni. She's from Malta and she'll be sharing her experience of LIYSF with you. Enjoy. My name is Simran Mohanani and I attended LIYSF back in 2014 as a participant and I've worked there every summer since as a staff member because I literally couldn't get over how amazing and inspirational the forum is year upon year. After the forum I've a head of her heroes in love with London, a global hub of opportunities, the spontaneity of its art, and cultures from all across the globe. So I was really excited to hopefully, when they come back and make it my hometown. Ever since graduating last summer, I've been really fortunate to actually make this dream come true and I'm currently working in London as a technology consultant in systems engineering at Deloitte. It is no cliche to say that LIYSF changed my world in so many ways. In fact it was actually at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College where I first discovered that I could apply my favorite subjects, maths, and chemistry together to really create some amazing things like sequester CO2 underground, or create artificial blood, or create hydrogen from algae. And after I stumbled upon chemical engineering there, I knew this is exactly what I want to do. And so I applied to the University of Bath in the UK to actually study chemical engineering and I haven't looked back since. In fact the first person that I knew over there from my course was actually a fellow LIYSF participant who was from Spain in 2014. And in fact over the five years of my chemical engineering degree, we actually lived together and she's still one of my closest friends still today. That's how communal LIYSF makes the whole world feel. For me LIYSF has always been a lens into the most cutting edge science of our time, and a revelation of role models that I can one day aspire to being. But more than anything, for me LIYSF is an international family, knowing that you have friends for life scattered across the globe and that together your court is something that's so much bigger than ours is. This is LIYSF. So LIYSF alumni truly go on to do some amazing and inspirational things in the world of science. You really are surrounded by the world's next generation of amazing scientists and engineers from all over the globe. And now I'm just so excited to present to you the next LIYSF alumni. It's Maurice from Jamaica. He was an alumni or he attended LIYSF back in 1986 and he's got an amazing sort of inspirational story to tell you. My name is Maurice Brown and I attended the London International Youth Science Forum, the LIYSF, in 1986. I was part of only the second group of participants to represent my school and my country, Jamaica. And I'm proud to say that this is a tradition that has continued. Today I live and work in the Netherlands, where after years of working in the world of corporate business, I am now a senior lecturer in finance and business strategy and the University of Applied Sciences in the City of Utrecht. Attending the LIYSF was not easy. Coming from so far with limited resources available, there was a lot to get organized. However, with a strong will and desire and with close contact and help from the director and the team of the LIYSF, it was made possible. That close and strong contact continues today. My attending the LIYSF was my first real experience in a truly international setting and one I will never forget. This would later set the stage for my curiosity for wanting to see more and discovering the world and the countries we live in. Taking part in fantastic and meaningful lectures on topics related to science was great. However, the various outings and cultural activities organized left me with many fond memories and experiences, which include a lot of laughter. The intense friendships forged during the two weeks together can and may last you a lifetime. By taking part in the LIYSF, you are not just being a participant, you are now part of a community, a family, a family of forward-thinking minds and an experience that you will value and will shape you forever. Okay, thank you. As I say, don't worry if the videos froze or didn't play for you, we will be posting those on our website today. So the hallmark of LIYSF is the caliber of our speakers, which each year includes a Nobel Prize winner speaking at the forum. We are privileged to welcome the best scientific researchers to address our students and are thrilled to announce already our 2021 speaker program. I have highlighted here just a few of them, which include Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine Professor James Rothman from Yale University, Engineering and Climate Change UK Government Advisor Dame Julia King, Astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal, the Lord Martin Rees, world-renowned stem cell researcher Professor Fiona Watt, Space Scientist Maggie Adrienne Pocock, Artificial Intelligence Professor and Vice Provost for Research at Imperial College London, Professor Nick Jennings, Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer Materials Chemist Professor Seifel Islam and Public Health England's Pharmacy Lead for Antimicrobial Resistance, Dr Diane Ashiri Oedope. These are just some of our exciting speakers that are coming next year. We now have a short video from the leading scientists that have already lectured LIYSF in recent years and include their messages to our students whilst with us. The key thing about the LIYSF is it makes the science social elements and getting people involved through demonstration of their own research through their projects and that's key but it uses science as a catalyst to bring people together so they can communicate their ideas and really understand the importance of science in the broad endeavors of the world. Science for all religion, for all culture, for all colour and the universe doesn't look at where you come from. I think there are real friendships that form. In my own experience, you know, I'm still in touch with people that I met here in London at the Science Forum and that's nearly 30 years later and there are names that I read and they line to me to read the newspapers that I remember from that year so I have to believe The ways that I would say the ways that science can improve communities is to listen and to learn more from what has happened to be more reflective. The world can change and the world can change to the better. I think the world has changed for about over the last 50, 70 years. That change comes about because people don't accept today and they want to make a better world. That drive comes from young people. It doesn't come from people my age. Don't accept the world for what it is, accept the world for what new writers make. My advice for participants is to just say yes to stuff. A lot of the weird and wonderful opportunities that have come my way over the years have been just because I said yes to opportunities. Find a problem that really does excite you, an itch you want to scratch and just then think what do I need to address that? What are the disciplines I need? Do I necessarily think that the problem will be solved using one particular approach or another? Be open to the possibility of moving fields as well from chemistry to biology, biology to physics. When I was a young girl I was really excited by science but there were no opportunities like this for me. There had been other shots. They shouldn't harness every opportunity that they get, every interaction that they make. Networks are what support people and networks are what build leaders. We talk about going to these alien planets to go to live. Probably there is no planet being. This is the one we live on and this is the one which young scientists I hope can help us fix because it's pretty broken and go on to a better future where maybe we can actually go to other planets. This brings us to our future lecture with our president Professor Claire Erwell. Claire Erwell is Vice Dean for Impact and Professor at Medical Physics at University College London. She is also president of the Society for Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy. Professor Erwell currently leads the Bill Gates funded project Brain Imaging for Global Health Project which delivered the first brain images of infants in Africa. She won many awards including the Women in Science and Engineering Research Award and was a 2018 British Science Association Media Fellow at the Financial Times. We are very honoured and grateful to have Professor Claire Erwell as our president and I welcome her to give her lecture now. Hello everybody it's an absolute pleasure to be with you all here today and to be able to join this amazing celebration of LIYSF. And also to be able to share the excitement of seeing people join from all over the world to see the different time zones of people are joining from and to already see the connection on the chat of people starting to interact in the way that they would do in a live event. So it's an absolute joy to be here and I've had the honour of being a participant, a speaker and now the president of the forum so it remains very very close to my heart. I'm going to stop my video in a second and share my screen and I'm going to talk to you briefly this afternoon about something about my journey in the forum but then I'm going to talk to you about a project that's been happening in my institution at UCL over the last few months which for me really encapsulates a huge amount of the spirit of the forum in terms of innovation, collaboration and making a global impact with our science. So let me just share my screen with you all now. This is where we hope the tech works seamlessly. Okay so my journey at LIYSF started back in 1984. Here I am as a participant then on one of the visits and on the left hand side you can see the program which is slightly less snazzy than it is today but actually inside the program contains many of the features that those of you that have attended the forum will be familiar with. So a combination of scientific lectures visits, debates, social program and I was studying at that time maths, physics and chemistry as a high school student and I was interested in medicine and thought that I would probably want to go on and do medicine and become a doctor and for this reason I chose a visit to the Royal Marsden Hospital and it was on this visit that really my life changed. I was introduced to the first for the first time on that visit to the topic of medical physics. This is the use of physics and engineering in developing healthcare technologies to change the world and really when I was introduced to this topic via some images, brain images as you can see here and spoke to some real life medical physicists and engineers on that visit I thought this is my light bulb moment this is what I want to do so I came away from the forum with my career because I went on to study medical physics and I've been working in this area ever since. The area that I work in and the technology that I've been developing over the last 30 years is optical brain imaging and this is a type of imaging that allows us to access brain imaging in areas and locations and with different types of patients and subjects for whom conventional imaging like magnetic resonance imaging just isn't possible so it's literally opened up a whole new world in the way in which we can look at the brain and as Richard said I currently need a project called brain imaging for global health which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This project is helping us understand the impact of malnutrition and poverty related effects on infant brain development. We're literally looking into the brains of the next generation of tiny babies to understand what more we can do to really protect most precious resource. Because of the work that I've been involved in in Africa and because of my involvement with the London International Youth Science Forum I started a charity called Young Scientist for Africa and I'm really thrilled to see that we have both the trustees and some of the students the YOSA students on the call this afternoon so a particular welcome to you. I'm excited about the capacity for YOSA to really broaden the reach of the forum to make sure that it's open and accessible to everybody on the planet and here's a photograph of some of the students that we've sponsored attending from a range of different countries in Africa and we're looking forward to working more with YOSA to give this opportunity to more young African scientists. So these are the key three themes that I always think about when I think about the forum and actually when I think about my career in science. Science and engineering for me is all about innovation, creating things that don't currently exist, thinking about how we can create new things that will really change the world. But in my discipline of medical physics I'm always working in collaborative teams, I'm working with people from different disciplines and I'm very familiar with that as being a theme throughout the forum so for those of you that have attended the forum you'll always be familiar with the idea of working in groups and thinking about how you can solve problems together so collaboration is a really important feature but really almost what's most important here and you've seen it through some of the videos that we've already watched this afternoon is how we can make an impact with our science not just within our own borders, not just with the problems that we can see in front of us but across the planet, how can we make global impact with the work that we do? And it's these three key themes of innovation, collaboration and global impact that I want to really focus in on when I start to speak to you about the project that's been happening at UCL in the last few months is a rapid response for the global pandemic of COVID-19. I've been working alongside some of the people that have done this project, I'm not one of the engineers that's been inside of it but I want to tell you the story of this project because I think it really exemplifies all of the qualities that we're trying to really promote through the forum. So as you all well know, beginning of this year saw the emergence of unprecedented numbers of patients affected by the respiratory disorder COVID-19 and those patients requiring respiratory support often in high-level intensive care units. Back in early March in the UK we could see the wave of the pandemic sweeping through other countries and our intensive care doctors were getting information from doctors in China and Italy particularly about the use of a management strategy called continuous positive airways pressure or CPAP for short and their success in using this strategy to manage COVID-19 patients. Using CPAP was keeping about half of these patients from needing mechanical invasive ventilation and so being able to use CPAP was freeing up those high-level intensive care beds for the most critically ill patients. So what is CPAP? Well it's essentially a mechanism of supporting your own breathing. It does this by providing a constant positive pressure which really acts almost like a pneumatic splint and keeping the lungs open and delivering oxygenated blood. It's quite a simple technique and it can be very effective in patients who are already able to breathe on their own but need additional breathing support but may not be sick enough to need full invasive ventilation where which involves putting a tube down the windpipe of the patient and can be associated with a number of complications. So the unmet clinical need here is that back in early March UK hospitals had a very limited supply of these CPAP devices that could deliver the type of constant continuous pressures with high levels of oxygen concentration. So there was a clear need for a simple device that could be mass produced very rapidly. We're all aware of how quickly this particular virus spread through the population and how quickly we need to respond. So speed was absolute of the essence in this project and this is where the team from UCL started their journey. Tuesday the 17th of March these three people met together actually in a park just around the corner from UCL and they were a clinician, Mervyn Singer who runs the intensive care unit at the UCLH hospital, Tim Baker who's a mechanical engineer and Rebecca Shipley who's a professor of healthcare technologies and they were determined to start working on a solution in terms of delivering CPAP system so that Mervyn and others could start managing their patients using these systems. Mervyn brought along to that meeting one of these systems. This is an old CPAP system very few of them available in the NHS at that time. This is actually the nuts and bolts of a CPAP system, it's the flow generator. So I quickly just run through how this works. This generator exploits something called the venturi effect and this essentially means that if we pass a high flow jet of oxygen into the device following the blue arrow that's shown on the following diagram here if we have that high flow jet there that will draw in from this entrainment port and be an air around it and together that will generate a high output of oxygen in which air. Vows are used to control the level of positive pressure that's delivered to the patient along with the specific oxygen concentration that they need. It's a pretty simple device and the beauty of it is it contains no moving parts or electronics. So the engineers saw this as something that should be easy to reproduce. So Tim Baker took that system from the clinician Mervyn on Tuesday and by Wednesday he gathered together a team of mechanical engineers in a space called Metspace which was one of our mechanical engineering student areas. It's an engineering area for people to make things and Tim brought into the project at that point his industrial collaborator Ben Hodgkinson who works for the Mercedes one Formula One team and this team now of engineers and students industrial team from Mercedes started to put their thinking caps on about how they could really deliver on this issue of mass producing one of these systems. What they did was reverse engineer the system so that they could redesign it so that it could be mass produced through the production lines of Mercedes. The whole of the Mercedes plant was a full and silent because of the suspension of the Formula One season and they were ready and willing to put their production lines into producing these CPAP systems. So here's the original device again. They put it through a CT scanner to understand what it was made of internally and then they basically started to cut into it and look at each individual component and make intricate and very specific measurements of each of those components so that they could create these computer design drawings and it's these computer design drawings that were then sent to the production line in Northamptonshire in the UK where Mercedes had their production line to start making the systems and within just 100 hours after the first meeting between the clinicians and the engineers the first prototype CPAP system had been made. It was then taken over to the hospital and here's Mervyn Singer the clinician very happy to see one of these systems and hospital testing began in volunteers and while that was happening the engineers continued to work on improving the design of this system. They wanted to minimize the amount of oxygen that was required to drive this system knowing that in a global pandemic of a virus like covid oxygen is one of the most precious resources that the NHS has so it produced a mark the engineers produced a mark two system which reduced the oxygen requirements and also improved patient comfort by reducing the circuit resistance. Now we can't take any system into clinical use until we've got full regulatory approval so also behind the scenes there were a team working specifically on all of the paperwork required to gain approval from the medicines and healthcare products agency in the UK. This happened in within just a few days by the Friday the 27th of March this is unheard of it's unprecedented that approval has been granted that quickly normally it can take several months and sometimes several years but the clever thing about the approach the team had taken was that they were re-engineering a device that had previously been approved for clinical use and that meant that it's a more straightforward process in getting this new design approved. Then within a few days the government of the UK had placed an order for 10 000 units for the NHS and the production lines in Mercedes swung into action 12 production lines working flat out producing 1000 units per day and on the 15th of April less than one month after that initial meeting between the clinicians and the engineers these units were delivered to the NHS. The clinical impact in the UK has been highly significant these systems are now used in over 60 hospitals and the use of these systems is mirroring the experiences from Italy and China early in March in reducing the need to put patients on mechanical ventilations. With these systems patients can be safely managed outside of the intensive care environment and the complications for these patients are much lower than if they had been fully mechanically ventilated. Not satisfied with just delivering these systems to the UK the team at UCL started to think about how they could have a global reach with this project so in partnership with the UCL business division they organised a system of a licensing system for the designs and the manufacturing instructions of this device that could be distributed to manufacturers, research institutions, health care providers and non-profit sector individuals. This package contains everything that you need to know about making one of these systems all of the drawings the materials information the testing information the assembly requirements and the tooling that you'll need and this has now been released open source and free of charge it's been downloaded over 1,900 times and has been downloaded by teams in over 100 countries and over 30 teams are successfully producing prototypes and progressing to regulatory approval. We know this is a global pandemic so we know that we need a global solution and that's what the team at UCL have been focusing on ensuring that everyone gets the benefit of this system and the way in which they can use it to manage patients. Here's the team that have put all of this work together and I want to really emphasise here how interdisciplinary this work has been so we have mechanical engineers we have PhD students we have intensive care doctors we have highly skilled engineers from Mercedes but there was also a huge number of logistics and distribution issues that needed to be sold so a number of other companies have also been brought in and then of course there was the regulatory authorities that needed to approve the system and more recently working globally with the World Health Organization and other international bodies to ensure the distribution of these instructions and in some cases these systems internationally. If you want to find out more about this project there's lots of information at this website and this in slides and this website will go alongside the videos that Richard mentioned in terms of making sure that you've got access to the content after this webinar but hopefully what this has shown you is this is a real-life project that happened within the last few months in response to a global crisis it involved innovation it collaboration was central and key and the impact has been global and for me these are all the qualities that we really want to encapsulate in the London International Youth Science Forum so for those of you that have already attended the forum we're excited to hear more of your stories about how you're using your experiences to change the world and for those of you that are interested I urge you to apply for the forum and come and attend the forum next summer and learn all of these specific skills and go out into the world and change the world thank you. Thank you very much Claire. So we've had some questions in we're now at that section for our question and answers for the session one of the questions that we've had is some more information about the requirements to come to the Science Forum and what's included so you remember in the slides earlier I mentioned that you need to be aged 16 to 21 years old fluent in English and passionate about science now we're welcoming students from 70 countries around the world so we're not looking at exam grades or necessarily projects or any any competition you've been in what we're doing is if you have a look on the website on the application page we ask for a referee so what we need is if you're applying independently you need to supply a referee in order to support your application and the easiest person for this is a teacher at school or college that's able to support your application ideally your science teacher or your head teacher the only exception to this is if you're applying to join us from Australia Brazil excuse me China or Canada then we have national organisers that help us select our students so send an application or send us an email if you're not sure and we'll get back to you as to what is either an individual application or if you're in Brazil China Canada Australia will connect you with our national optimizer they sometimes have some extra requirements as they're selecting the groups and we do have limited numbers so it's always a good idea to apply early also regarding the charge that I mentioned and what's included we try to put this package together for the science forum that if once you with us everything's taken care of so you've got to get to London and we've now got a year into the next year's forum so we've got a lot of time we've got some advice on our website about fundraising about how you can gather money locally to get the money we know it's you know a lot of money to get the flight and to stay with us but once you're with us for those two weeks everything's included all the accommodation all the meals all the lectures all the program all the scientific visits everything is all included there are a few optional extras if you want to join us on a sightseeing tour to the theatre or to Stonehenge and these are a little bit extra but what we're trying to do maybe so that once you with us you've got a fully inclusive program organized and put together for you so that's it from my question Claire if you want to jump in with one of yours and come back to mine yes absolutely I can see the questions but they're coming through on the chat so um forgive me I'm going to look at them as I'm as I'm answering them so one of the questions that's come in is what's the most rewarding part of being president of LIYSF um it's doing things like this it's seeing the students the opening ceremony is one of the highlights of my year without a doubt hearing the stories of where people have come from their ambitions in science and then often seeing them come back the next year as a staff member and then finding out more about their journeys in science and as I said earlier getting a flavor of that from the chat here um it just brings back that excitement of LIYSF um there isn't another event like it in the world um so for me it's a it's hugely rewarding to be part of other people's journeys in science and another question I've had is I've mentioned optical brain imaging could be used to observe infants brain activity is this technology useful for infant psychology absolutely so um I work with a team of neuro developmental psychologists and as well as the work that we're doing in Africa we have done a whole range of studies in the UK um looking at the infant brain as it develops particularly looking at typical and atypical development so we've been looking at early markers of autism for example we're looking at how infants acquire language we're looking at how sleep patterns change the way in which infants learn so it's a particularly powerful technology to help us understand infant brain development and watch this space for more work that we're doing in that area um so I'm just going through the questions here um I can jump in a second if you'd like to I've got a few here from LIYSF as well that would be good somebody had been asking about the science bizarre and presenting a project so it's optional during the forum if you'd like to present a research project it's a non-competitive environment where we give you the chance if you've been doing a research project yourself either for a competition or your own research you can get the opportunity to present that what we call the science bizarre excuse me the science bizarre and this is a bit like a phd project evening that happens at universities and you just come round and ask you critical questions and give you feedback but don't worry if you haven't done a project you don't have to present we do ask everybody to come together and to join that session to come and learn and usually you know we have around 200 students presenting and someone asked if we're doing this year we're not we're keeping everything for next year however if you have a project and would like to share a short video about it please send it into us we are on our social media highlighting some of the projects and some of the projects that have been done to win places at the forum so please do share that with us but we're doing our full bizarre event next year and just on that subject people asked about what type of social events to organize during the two weeks at the forum it's we sort of become this sort of small bubble in our own community so we have events going on morning afternoon evening weekends all the time and you can see the schedule on the website and it's not only science the lectures and the visits but it's also cultural sharing understanding so we have crossword treasure events we have international cabarets we have traditions of home evenings we have student debate sessions we've got the science forum bizarre we've got a whole range of activities we've got a sports olympics day we've got a lot of activities going on so we're able to get a real variety in the experience so you'll see a little bit of that in our video but also if you check out the 2021 page on the website you can see the different sections that go through some of our events. Maybe I can start answering some of the other questions that have come up on the feet so I think quite a few of the questions that are coming through are relating to how has the research community responded to the pandemic and particularly in medical physics so I've got the privilege of being vice-team for impact for the Faculty of Engineering at UCL which means that I get to find out about lots of the projects that are ongoing and the first thing I will say is that the agility that scientists have shown in repurposing their skills so that they can really tackle this pandemic has been phenomenal so people may be working on a range of different projects but very quickly they started to think how can we use our skills and knowledge specifically for this pandemic there are many examples of this one example is for example for understanding the effect that the pandemic is having on people's lungs we know that we can take lung images but how do we create really effectively and rapidly a database of those images and use machine learning in some cases to pick out particular characteristics of lung damage that may be associated with this virus which may help treatment and the management of patients going forward that's just one example there's been a lot of work being done on understanding obviously vaccinations but associated with that how do we test and trace people so all of the mobile technologies that engineers have been working on for a range of different reasons and now being put behind methodologies that enable us to understand where people are who may be carrying the virus and ultimately how we contract vaccination distribution and make sure that it has the highest impact there's also been a huge repurposing of funding so the units at UCL engineering called the Bax Hub which is involved in mass manufacture of vaccines and has been working on this type of these types of projects for many years rediverted some of their funding and some of their actual equipment to the unit in Oxford which is one of the central hubs in the UK for vaccine development so you may think of scientists as being very competitive we have to compete for funding very often but there have been many examples in this pandemic of scientists working together sharing resources sharing funding and sharing expertise for the common goal of overcoming this virus fantastic just it's actually nicely that we can go and we've had a question about the impact of Covid on next year's forum and if there'll be any restrictions or what we're anticipating so we're staying up to date with all the latest advice and all the government guidelines and relevant recommendations and we'll be taking all the required necessary steps at the moment it's too early to tell we're all hoping that the world is very different in a few months time but we'll be looking at you know what measures we need to take and we'll be taking those very seriously it may be the case that we'll run the event but it may have to be in smaller breakout sessions and we'll be looking at how we manage distancing and how that works together we're we're planning our event taking place next year absolutely and we'll have more information come next spring when things are more clear about what restrictions or what elements we'll have to take to go ahead but we will we will be going ahead I can see another question that's come in here about another subject very close to my heart medical physics Richard um about radiography and whether I collaborate with radiographers and whether they have the ability to be involved in this um all of this development um so I would say that anyone that has the skills in understanding uh methodologies and approaches for understanding the human body are really thinking about how they can use those skills in this pandemic so we know that coronavirus is not just a respiratory disorder we know it affects blood clotting and it has other side effects that need to be managed and so I think understanding more how we can screen for those um types of effects what the long-term effects are going to be in the population is going to be really important and as medical physicists we're always keen to think about developing strategies that are going to be most um cost effective so they can be rolled out across the whole populations but also ensuring that they're non-invasive so that they will there will be a high take up of people so breast screening is one example of that um so I think what medical physicists will be doing going forward and it's already started with brain imaging is thinking about how we can uh if we move past this acute phase how we can help to contribute with um imaging technologies and new types of approaches to imaging which will help us understand what what the long-term effects of this virus are. Great well I have one more here as well asking about whether we'll be doing the optional CERN program next year again we're very much hoping to uh we're keeping in touch with CERN obviously at the moment all the visitors centers and these organizations are closed so it's a bit too early to tell but we're all hoping that that will be possible next year and the CERN program is an optional addition spending an extra week with us and going off to Paris and Geneva and down in to see the uh the CERN laboratories um so that's an additional element to the science forum that's on top of the two weeks and again we'll keep you updated and we'll be sending out lots of information uh and if ever you're not sure you want to know something please always you can email us we're always here to help throughout the year. So there's another question that's come in around the medical industry of being one of the top-growing markets in the next year and how people can apply their ideas um particularly in medical physics. I'm going to relate this back to a question that I saw come up about the Gates Foundation and a question about what they were funding in Africa so um one of the things that we have to be as scientists is again we have to be agile about where the opportunities come from particularly for funding so I think there is a lot of focus now on the funding calls that will be emerging from this pandemic uh in particularly from institutions like the Wellcome Trust and others um really to think long term how we're going to deal with the with the uh consequences of it um the Gates Foundation have put a huge amount of funding into the vaccination programs previously for polio and other diseases um incredibly well placed now with this pandemic. I'll just tell you that the funding that I got from the Gates Foundation came from an open call it was a two-page application the first application that I put into the Gates Foundation um which is available to anybody okay I wasn't it wasn't because I was a professor at UCL that I was able to apply for that funding um there are programs that enable entrepreneurs people with ideas people that really think they can change the world to access funding um so perhaps Richard that's one of the things that we can start to incorporate into the forum is thinking about how we can introduce um science students into funding opportunities if they have ideas. I'm always amazed each year when I come to the forum about their level of entrepreneurship amongst the students um so if that's something that you think that we should be focusing on going forward we'd be really interested to discuss that. Absolutely and we work with a lot of partners both in UK and internationally like UNESCO like the British Council that are connected into all these exciting networks all around the world so that's definitely something we we took to a little bit in terms of opportunities for further study but also it's definitely an area that we can explore if there's the interest in those those elements as well. Okay great well thank you we're doing just about right on time um so what I'd like to do now is I'd like to um ask Ema Hickey to join us to give all those effects. Hello everyone my name is Emery and I am from Ireland and I first attended LIYSF back in 2014 and I'm now just finished university and about to start a PhD in fungal disease research here in the UK and I'm here today to deliver our Boat of Thanks. Anyone at this webinar who has attended the forum before will remember the tradition of the LIYSF Boat of Thanks. At the forum we realize that our speakers and presenters give up their valuable time to inspire us and so we think it is only fair for us to in return to tell them how brilliant they are and and although this last hour has been delivered online I can tell you that a lot of people have worked together to make this happen. It was a whole new experience for us but I personally think it was a success. So firstly on behalf of LIYSF I would like to thank Professor Claire Elwell for her continued support and also for her lecture today. I really do think it was amazing to see what can be achieved when scientists and engineers and industry work together across all different fields to provide solutions to global problems. It really highlights how every single one of us can play a role in fighting COVID-19. We would also like to say a huge thank you to UCL for their technical support and hosting this webinar and in particular to Natalie Webb and the Faculty of Engineering Sciences. I really don't believe we could have given you all a true flavor of LIYSF without our alumni and speakers who were able to share their thoughts via video so I want to say thank you to all of them for sharing their memories with us and of course on behalf of everyone here at the forum I would like to say a huge thank you to all of you who joined us here today. It really was so heartwarming to see you all introduce yourselves and it's incredible to think that we had represented those from 70 countries on this call today. I want to give a particular shout out to those of you who had to get up really early or stay up really late just to join us here today and although we were not able to host our forum in person this year I really do hope that this past hour helped inspire those of you who are both new and old to the forum and then I guess to finish I and I think on behalf of everyone on this call would actually like to thank LIYSF too and all of us are at this webinar because we simply love the forum and I can without doubt say that it had had a huge impact on the lives of anyone who has attended and this is really obvious when viewing the alumni videos which are being posted on social media every week. So in particular I want to thank Ogily, Richard and Guillermy who do Trojan work throughout the year to make the forum a reality for us all. So I'm very glad all of us have been brought together by the London International Youth Science Forum and we really look forward to seeing you all in person in 2021. Thank you. Oh um just to add to that a wonderful voice of thanks provided by Ema. I'd like to thank Ema herself for all her hard work and help this session in putting these videos together. She's our Chief of Staff and you'll be hopefully seeing her again next year in person. We really hope you enjoy this webinar and that we can look forward to the possibility of welcoming you and perhaps your students attending next summer to the 62nd LIYSF taking place in July. Applications are indeed now open and you can apply, I can apply on our websites. If you have any questions as I've said please don't hesitate to get in touch with us by email. We are really excited about delivering the 62nd LIYSF in 2021 at a time when it feels more important than ever to be looking to the possibilities and opportunities in science and engineering. Next year may sound far away but trust us it's worth the year of waiting for an event of a lifetime. Thanks again so much for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you further and until next time. Goodbye.