Tag: bioengineering

Summer Derby Day Party

There are many pitfalls that must be navigated as you work towards earning a PhD: one of the biggest is isolation. By its very nature, a PhD requires you to be researching something new and unique and when you’re at your desk trying to work out why the data looks weird, because it always looks weird, it can be easy to forget you’re not alone. That’s why events like the PhD Summer Party are so important. Thanks to the generosity of the Graduate School and the Bioengineering Department, every year, we’re afforded the opportunity to relax, make new friends outside of the lab, and live the student dream of free food and drink. This year was no different.

After a solid week of rain, the heavens cleared on the last Thursday as if to bless the oncoming merriment of the evening. We’re fortunate in Bioengineering to have very talented staff who have joined together to form the Gastric Band and, with the help of some volunteers, they relocated and set up in on the 8th floor of the Blackett Building complete with terrace. After some, shall we say, efficient preparations, the room was ready for the party to begin promptly at 5:30pm. By 5:45, the food was gone; at least that’s how I remember it. It wasn’t long before the room was full of clusters of people chatting, their plates laden with delicious BBQ all being washed down with a selection of delicious drinks. The warm weather meant we could venture out on to the terrace and look over the city as the sun slowly set over the capital. With everyone fed and watered, the band took centre stage and the party began in earnest.

The band astounded with renditions with their covers of rock classics, like “Johnny Be Good”, to pop hits, like Cee-lo Green’s “Forget You”, and everything in between. Though reluctant at first, 6:30pm is a bit early to boogie, it wasn’t long before the dancefloor was established and all manner of shapes were being thrown. Each member of the band shone with spectacular solos but the mellifluous voices of Kemi Aofolaju and Melanie Albright really got people cheering. Even Professor Bull got on the stage and had us bopping along to “Hit the Road Jack”. If you ever get a chance, see the Gastric Band: I guarantee you will not regret it.

9pm came, and with it the end of our booking. The band packed up, the reps and volunteers cleaned up, and my colleagues grabbed their “one for the road” and made their way to the Union Bar to continue the festivities. It would be easy to see the Summer party as just a time to blow off some steam and a waste of money for various departments but I believe it plays a vital role in making the PhD experience just that bit easier and more enjoyable. Whether it’s new friendships that you help you expand your research and build your career or just a friendly face to say hi to by the coffee machine. Every year the party gives us the opportunity to hop over the pitfall of isolation all to the tune of Toto’s “Hold the Line”. If you ask me, that’s worth every penny.

Go-Karting Event – 1st Year Bioeng PhD students

by Enrico Varano

On Sunday the 17th of March 2019, the first-year PhD students from the Bioengineering Department enjoyed an active day out which started with a go-karting race in Sandown Park and culminated in a joyful social over dinner at Franco Manca in Earl’s Court. The students, who organised the outing on the WhatsApp group they created at the beginning of the year, sought to reinforce the professional ties and personal bonds they developed since the first social at the beginning of February. The event was made possible thanks to funding obtained through the Imperial College London Graduate School from the Research Community Fund, for which the students are very grateful.

The day out started at 1 P.M. when the students met at the South Kensington Campus to catch a minibus ride they’d booked, and headed out for Sandown Park. The bus quickly filled with a variety of overlapping conversations with topics ranging from technical comparisons of experimental methodologies to the importance of engaging as Teaching Assistants for one’s own self-development. Such conversations promote collaboration: as an example, a professional connection between two students which emerged in the previous social event resulted in one’s participation in the other’s lab work as a pilot subject – allowing them to further tune their experimental design through discussion other peers. As one student put it: “It’s also nice to connect with people who I might be able to collaborate with – providing opportunities for similar connections to occur is essential and may result in fruitful collaborations and exchanges of perspectives of the challenges PhD students face daily”.

As the minibus approached the venue, those that had been go-karting before shared their accounts of previous experiences. The weather gave some signs of worsening before clearing up, fortunately – the track was just made humid enough to make the spin-outs funnier to recount on the minibus on the way back. The student engaged in the race showing their competitive spirits and very much enjoyed the challenge of handling the karts in damp conditions. The event ended with pizzata – Italian for a pizza get together – in Franco Manca at Earl’s Court, where the room filled with friendly conversation.

Indeed, aside from the aspect of providing an opportunity to develop professional relationships for direct scientific collaboration, a very important aspect of social interaction is to web a support network made of personal relationships between the students. This network enables students to manage any work-related anxiety, stress or loneliness by having a go-to person in a similar professional situation to them. The event was designed to facilitate a combination of the tension-releasing adrenaline-inducing sporting activity and the relaxed and informal follow-on dinner and was a great success! Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the day out, as one student’s reaction reveals: “We all had a fantastic time, relaxing, having fun and forgetting about work for a few hours! Very much looking forward to seeing my colleagues again for another event in a few weeks’ time!”

Bioengineering PhDs go for an escape room and dinner!

On Saturday the 2nd of February 2019, the first-year PhDs from the Bioengineering Department went for a nice evening out, that started with an escape room followed by a nice Italian dinner.

The objective of this activity was fomenting a good relationship and friendship between the first-year PhD students from the Bioengineering Department, as we don’t all know each other despite constantly crossing each other in the hallways. We are all now starting a 3-4 year journey where these relationships are going to be invaluable, not only on a personal level but also on the professional one, as thriving engineering usually requires (besides obvious personal effort) help/knowledge from others and team effort. Now we’ll know who to ask for help if we run into a problem that it is not in our main domain or field!

The evening started at 6:25pm as we gathered in the entrance of the escape room. For some it was their first time on an escape room, while for others it was another opportunity more to prove our intellects. We randomly divided into four teams and the game masters of HintHunt London led us to the entrance of our respective rooms and introduced us into the story we were going to play: for some of us it was about stopping an embezzler from doing a transaction while for others it was about getting out of a Japanese-themed room in less than an hour. After some stress because the time was running out, through teamwork and deduction skills, all the teams managed to get out of their rooms!

After this, we walked to Franco Manca, our destination for dinner, while getting to know each other. Once there, our lovely waiters led us to two adjacent tables where we had some great burrata as a starter, delicious pizza for main, and tiramisu for dessert, all accompanied by some wine. Even our Italian peers were satisfied with the feast!

After the dinner, some decided to retreat home, tired from the evening out, while some of us decided to move the evening to a pub, where we continued to get to know each other and had a few more drinks.

The event was a total success! We had lots of fun, used our heads, filled out tummies and had an overall great night! A big thank you to the Graduate School for funding this event, we’ll be making it an annual or even semesterly event!

Data and Algorithms: Good or bad? Spoiler alert: It’s more complicated than that!

By Victor Pedrosa, PhD student representative

Few things are more effective in motivating PhD students and researchers to take a break from their ‘Nobel Prize-winning’ research than pizza, drinks and the promise of an interesting
talk.

The Bioengineering PhD student representatives organised a talk on data ethics on Friday 9th of March. The topic was widely popular and the event was well-attended. There were some lively discussions over pizza and drinks in room 301.C at the Royal School of Mines Building.

Is data science intrinsically ethically good?

People mingled before the start of the talk, to get the food distraction out of the way, then Dr. Stefania Garasto started her talk titled “Data and algorithms: good or bad? Spoiler
alert: It is more complicated than that.”

She posed the question on whether data science is intrinsically ethically good and her presentation went on to show that algorithms are not ethically neutral because the values
and biases of their designers are reflected in the code. For example, Google shows high-paying job ads preferentially to men and ads with the word “arrest” are more likely to
appear when searching black-sounding names.

There are ethical concerns for current data practices. These practices beg such questions as: Do people have real control over their data? How can bias in the data be corrected? Who is responsible for the ethical failure of an algorithm? And these questions are hard to answer.

Stef presented the controversy over a Facebook case study wherein Facebook manipulated its users’ emotions without their knowledge by influencing their news feeds.
Many in the audience had not heard of this case and no one supported the ethics of this practice.

Stef went on to discuss how ethical data practices might be ensured. One is by law, for example, the GDPR principles. However, people pointed out that this could be restrictive
in data mining and that it might not cover everything, and it would at least be valid for everyone. Another option is to develop a sort of data code of conduct. Yet it was also
argued that this would be hard to enforce and this may vary from one organization to another.

Discussion continued with more pizza and drinks, and people shared with one another whether they were on social media or not and what their privacy settings were.

This event provided a good opportunity for the research students to get to know one another. There was good feedback from both students and other researcher guests about how the talk was a
good reminder to be vigilant about exercising control over our data.

We want to thank the Graduate School for funding this event and helping Bioengineering become a friendly research community.