Students Chemistry Experiment Wins Prestigious Prize

A national schools project that has allowed UK schools to prepare and run samples at Diamond Light Source has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Inspiration & Industry Award for 2018.

Led by Claire Murray, Julia Parker and Laura Holland, Project M receives the award for running an outstanding nationwide citizen science chemistry project to engage UK secondary students and teachers in real-life research.

During the project, pupils from 100 schools across the country prepared 1000 samples of calcium carbonate with different additives. The samples were analysed at Diamond over a 24 hour period and the results then sent to the schools to process. The research team are interested in finding out how different additives affect the different form of calcium carbonate produced – being able to easily produce different forms could be incredibly important for manufacturing.

Thanking all those involved in the organisation of the project Dr Murray added: “We are incredibly excited to accept this award. A lot of the hard work was done by the students themselves, and we were so impressed with how much they engaged with the research and with the project. We hope that the project will show students how incredible real research is and that real science is done by people like them – being a scientist is for everyone.”