Public Engagement Grant: Monsters, Maths...and Microbiology
A
s a microbiologist, I can see no reason why the public should not be as enchanted with my subject as I am. But, to encourage engagement, perhaps scientists should be using activities that are not obviously relevant: to engineer ‘science by stealth’ into the public domain. So the Monsters, Maths and Microbiology group was formed at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). I had previously set up the Bad Bugs Book Club (with several previous meetings supported by SfAM), and had managed — successfully — to use the Twilight vampire novel by Stephenie Meyer to encourage discussion on the transmission of infectious disease at the 2010 Manchester Children’s Book Festival. As Director of the Science and Engineering Graduate School, I met Matt Crossley, a new PhD student in the School of Computing, Maths and Digital Technology, during his induction. He was working on ‘Sim-Zombie’, a programme which could theoretically
model a zombie epidemic, and we decided to develop our interest in the undead together. Joined by Naomi Jacobs, Manager of the MMU EPSRC Bridging the Gap project ‘NanoinfoBio’
and Charlotte Jones, undergraduate biology project student, we planned a range of public engagement activities to bring monsters, maths and microbiology together, harmoniously and with educational aims. Our first task was to differentiate between our monsters of choice — vampires, zombies and werewolves — in terms of the parameters affecting outbreaks. Obvious differences included activity (vampires are only active at night, zombies are active all the time, and werewolves are active once a month) and speed (the traditional zombie is rather slow moving, vampires and werewolves somewhat faster — when active). Other aspects such as prevention (garlic anyone?), treatment (irreversible and generally gory) were also explored. Eventually we created an ‘activity mat’, which was provided to participants along with a brief scenario. They were then asked to identify the different parameters we required and write the information on the mat. The 43