Profile

Siarhei Hladyshau is a PhD student working in the Patil Group at EMBL Heidelberg.

Diary

December 2014, Belarus

During the Christmas holidays 2014 I was visiting my home town and used this opportunity to establish contact with my old school and to organize a school visit as part of the EMBL School Ambassadors programme. I very much like these kind of activities. When I was a school pupil myself I realized the importance of having direct contact to people who work in science. Such contacts helped me to get up-to-date information and formed my decision of which type of career and field of study I wanted to embark on. I hope that my visit was similarly helpful for the pupils.

Let me give you some information about the organisation of the visit. I have contacted my former physics teacher, who has always been very active organising various additional courses, hobby groups, preparation for school competitions and many other activities. Unfortunately, he is not working at the school anymore but is now focusing on professional development courses for teachers. Luckily he kept in contact with the local school administration and helped me to contact them.

In a second step, I have approached two new teachers in the school and coordinated the details of organising a lecture with them. We decided to offer a talk for two high-school classes – specialized in physics and biology – as many methods in the field of biology (that are based on physical principles) will be interesting for young physicists as well. We also decided to give a short overview of current internet-based platforms offering open educational resources and a variety of online lectures. The format of the talk was chosen to fit with a normal lesson time of 45 minutes.

So, the day X came and I presented my talk!

Most of my lecture was devoted to the field of modern biology and current methodologies. My aim was to tell the students about contemporary science, the work of biologists and to provide an overview of what they do and how they do it. Starting with the basics, like the central dogma of molecular biology, I have then described different areas of modern biology, such as structural biology, systems biology, bioinformatics, different microscopy methods, mass spectrometry and X-ray spectroscopy. I also showed different movies visualizing the idea of the central dogma, new sequencing technologies and metagenomics. As always, short movies helped to make the lecture even more interesting. My talk was followed by a question session. Many questions asked by the pupils showed a remarkable level of biological specialization, e.g. “How are enhancers working?” or “What is so special about the microbes that live on us?” A lot of questions asked centred around my personal way into science, and how I managed to achieve it.

For me it has been a very nice experience! I always try to participate in such kind of activities as I find them very useful. It helps pupils to find an interesting direction for their future activities and for me it helps to practice a number of useful skills. And of course: it is just a pleasure to do such things!

Many thanks to ELLS for supporting the EMBL School Ambassadors!