National Science Competition Success For Yarm School Students

Yarm School students have made their mark in a national science competition spearheaded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Centre of Research Excellence to engage Sixth Form students with cardiovascular research.

The team, comprising Noah Bickenson, Darshan Prabhakar, Ben Thompson, Ananya Singh, Kieran Gill and Sarah Mhando, was runner-up in the Science at Heart Competition.

The achievement has been rewarded with a prize of £2,000 to support science-related activities at the School.

The BHF Centre, based at Imperial College, London, asked groups of up to six pupils to design an ePoster to illustrate a strategy for bringing hard sciences and biomedicine together to reduce the number of deaths and disabilities caused by heart and circulatory disease.

The Yarm School Upper Sixth Form students, all aged 17, made it to the competition finals, for which they had to create a compelling, short presentation explaining their poster to an expert panel of judges.

Their novel strategy focused on designing encapsulated nanoparticles to treat the underlying cause of coronary artery disease.

The judges were looking for innovative ideas, a striking ePoster design and original illustrations with the pitch focusing on communicating with non-experts.

Tom Newman, Head of Biology and the Medical Society at Yarm, said: “The team should be very proud for being named runners-up in this prestigious national competition.

The extra-curricular experience of working together, designing a compelling and innovative strategy and having to pitch the idea to an expert panel will have proved a life enhancing experience for our students.

The creativity, enthusiasm and hard work they all brought to this competition was inspiring.

Encouraging pupils to become involved in such external projects is extremely beneficial as it demonstrates how relevant what is being learned in the classroom is in the outside world.”