ISIS is used by roughly 3000 researchers every year, and many repeatedly come back for subsequent studies and experiments. It’s crucial to nurture and develop the next generation of scientific researchers, so ISIS runs a ‘bring an undergrad to ISIS’ scheme for early career researchers. This programme provides funding for travel and accommodation for undergraduate students to join and shadow a research group.
Matt Potter, a research fellow at the University of Bath’s Department of Chemistry, has already engaged with the programme. He researches sustainable chemical technologies, and he uses neutrons to understand how these materials behave. Matt also lectures an undergraduate course covering topics such as quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS).
Matt offered some of his students the opportunity to visit ISIS and join him on some of his experiments, and two of the students who took part in the scheme are Molly Kidd and Amy Matthews.
Molly is in her 2nd year studying Chemistry with Management. She was originally just studying chemistry, but after her 1st year modules leaned towards business, following her A-Level in business, she switched courses. She’s trying to keep her future options open and says, “I’d really like to go into chemistry, but I want a mix of both”.
Molly spent a full day at ISIS last October, and had a very positive experience. On her course, she has access to fewer practical lab sessions than someone just studying Chemistry, so she says it was invaluable to “actually see how real life chemists work”. It was a particularly beneficial opportunity as Molly was better able to understand and contextualise the models discussed in her lectures; as someone who prefers hands-on approaches, Molly’s visit strongly reinforced the theory she’d been learning.
Amy is in the 4th year of her Chemistry course, currently doing her final year research project. At the end of last year, Matt was running a quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) experiment on the Osiris instrument at ISIS, and Amy was able to shadow him for a day. She was able to see data being collected in real time, and She has since done a lecture course on that experiment, and now understands it much better.
For Amy, coming to ISIS suddenly made advanced research feel a lot more tangible – she saw the collaborative nature of research and says, “it suddenly felt accessible and achievable. I thought I could actually be doing this.” It’s made her more confident in her decision to do a PhD at Manchester University, on ‘electronic structure of actinide complexes’. Her visit also sparked collaborations with the Catalysis Hub, who helped to provide data for Amy’s undergraduate project.
Overall, the programme gave Matt, Molly, and Amy a really positive experience. Matt says, “for students studying a single science, it’s very beneficial to come to ISIS and see the range of the multi-disciplinary research. And for researchers who aren’t already involved with facilities like ISIS, they see a bit of a barrier – participating in a programme like this helps to spread understanding of what ISIS is and what it does, not just to undergrads but also to colleagues at the university.”
To find out more about the funding available to bring an undergraduate student to ISIS,
visit our webpage.
