Inspirational last CCBIO seminar of 2024
CCBIO has a tradition of using the December meeting in its seminar series to add a different perspective and encourage our research environment to think outside of the box. This December, we had the pleasure of welcoming back Fran Balkwill, who has a unique experience in addition to her cancer research career.
Main content
Fran Balkwill is Professor of Cancer Biology at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, and Deputy Centre Lead in the Centre for Tumour Microenvironment. She is especially interested in translating knowledge of cancer biology into new biological treatments for cancer. Much of her work focuses on the tumor microenvironment of ovarian cancer. After publishing a multi-level profile of the human ovarian cancer microenvironment, her lab has developed a platform of new mouse ovarian cancer models as well as human multi-cellular tissue culture models. They are now using these to research biological therapies that may prevent relapse and increase patient survival.
The focus of this talk, however, was on Balkwill’s parallel career in public engagement and informal science learning.
Balkwill described how her initial experience of science journalism inspired her parallel career with writing science books for children, and how fruitful collaborations with illustrators developed and made her books transformative for her young readership. She explained how she founded and directs an informal biomedical science learning center, Centre of the Cell, which was the very first science center to be located within a center for biomedical research laboratories. Centre of the Cell seeks to positively impact on educational, career and health choices of young people and families with its digital interactive STEM Pod, workshops and shows in Neuron Pod, outreach, mentoring and volunteering opportunities. There have been more than 254,000 participants in Centre of the Cell activities since the opening in September 2009.
In the discussion following her talk, Balkwill explained more in depth how the activities and outreach initiated by Centre of the Cell has been inspirational for a wide variety of school children and transformative for particular groups. She further elaborated on how science journalism has developed over the years, and how she was engaged in this topic. Balkwill highlighted how volunteering in science outreach activities and training in science communication could benefit young researchers and even increase their chances of succeeding with getting their research grant applications funded.
The CCBIO Director Lars A. Akslen feels this seminar aired an important topic.
“This talk was very inspirational to all of us. Science communication is one of the pillars of academic life, and its importance is clearly underrated. In the future, we need to focus more on educating our surroundings as well as ourselves by using simpler terms than what we are used to. Challenging – but worth trying,” Akslen says.
The Christmas seminar was concluded with continued discussions and pizza in the hallway outside of the auditorium.
The CCBIO seminar series starts up again after the holidays with the January seminar on the 30th, with speaker Austin James Rayford.