The Babraham Institute has a long history of attending science and research festivals, including the Cambridge Festival (previously the Cambridge Science Festival). We have brought a number of exhibits to the Cambridge Festival, including Virus Fighter, Race Against the Ageing Clock, The Cell Escape Room, Weapons of Microscopic Destruction, and more. We have also given virtual tours of our Biological Support Unit, and organised panel discussions on aspects of our research.
In the coming years, we hope to expand our reach by attending the Peterborough STEM Festival and Norwich Science Festival.
As an example of our festival work, the below gallery shows our Molecular Explorers exhibit at the 2017 Cambridge Science Festival. Over 20 Babraham Institute researchers were part of the exhibit at the Cambridge Guild Hall. The event featured sessions for adults only and for adults and children who have an autism spectrum condition.
Our researchers challenged visitors to become a Babraham Institute 'Molecular Explorer' in our pop-up lab and work with them to discover more about how their body works and adapts as they get older. The visitors tried their hands at microscopy, pipetting and flow cytometry and got to grips with autophagy (recycling inside cells) and how DNA is arranged in the cell nucleus.
Photographs by Michael Hinton and Graham CopeKoga © Babraham Institute 2017