New King's Public Engagement award led by Miguel Xochicale

Miguel will collaborate with Fang-Yu Lin and Shu Wang to create activities to engage school students with ultrasound-guidance intervention and fetal medicine. In the FETUS project, they will develop interactive activities with 3D-printed fetus, placenta phantoms as well as the integreation of a simulator that explain principles of needle enhancement of an ultrasound needle tracking system.

The aim of the project FETUS, Finding a fETus with an Ultrasound Simulator, is to increase the awareness of young people, living in Southwark and Lambeth with the involvement of The Young Persons’ Advisory Group (YPAG), on what research engineers do and the impact they make to society. For the workshops, participants will have first-hand experience through creative and interactive activities of the current and future challenges in fetal medicine and ultrasound-guidance intervention. The activities are: a) guessing the age of a baby before birth (fetus) (b) playing with a placenta phantom and (c) playing with an ultrasound simulator to tracking needles.

The anticipated outcomes of the 12-month project are the creation of mutual benefit between young audiences and research engineers by (a) encouraging young audiences to pursue a career in STEM and (b) improving communications and project managements skills of research engineers. Experiences of the activities will be shared by writing blogs and disseminating outputs within the faculty, department and schools. In addition, such activities will help to engage with other researchers and clinicians to spark collaboration, to design future events for other type of audiences as well as the potential to publish the outcomes of the project in scientific journals.

The award of King’s Public Engagement Grant is of £1000, starting in January 2021, and it is funded by the The Centre for Doctoral Studies in King’s College London and the Wellcometrust Institutional Strategic Support Fund.

Fang-Yu, Shu and Miguel thank everyone in the Ultrasound Needle Tracking and GIFT-Surg teams for their support.