As part of an IntoUniversity Outreach programme, Chloe Peach, PhD Student in the Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE), Nicola Dijon and Ellen Guest, students at the University of Nottingham, went into Nottingham Academy to present to a class of Year 9 students to the field of pharmacology and drug discovery. This aimed to introduce school pupils interested in medicinal sciences to alternative careers to medicine. This also gave us an opportunity to publicise our work to the community and show what research scientists do. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of drug discovery, this included in vitro pharmacologists Chloe and Nicola from the Cell Signalling Research Group (School of Life Sciences) as well as Ellen, a computational chemist partly sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline working on modelling protein-ligand interactions in the Hirst group (School of Chemistry).

The session began with an activity guessing everyday objects from electron microscopy images obtained from the UoN Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre (nmRC) by Matt Wadge, a PhD student working on biomedical materials (School of Engineering). This was followed by an introduction to what pharmacology is and how drug discovery research works, building on the small scale of cells that can be seen by microscopes. There were then three interactive stations covering: (1) the drug discovery pipeline and animal research; (2) a practical using fluorescent proteins seeing which objects fluoresce under UV light (including rhodamine fluorophores, a kiwi fruit, honey, images drawn with ‘invisible ink’, etc.), with special thanks to advice from the School of Life Sciences Imaging (SLIM) team; and (3) common pharmaceutical drugs, matching drugs to symptoms and side effects.

Students were then given the opportunity to ask us questions on post-it notes, which had an impressive range from “what do we enjoy about working in the lab” to “why can certain chemicals can both help and harm people”. Having also asked whether we had ever made an approved drug during our PhD studies, they were unsurprisingly shocked by the average time and cost taken for a drug to get approved. It was an enjoyable experience, particularly with students that clearly engaged and had insightful discussions about research. As a class of teenagers, it was also interesting to realise what will and will not engage them about science. It certainly reminded us of the ‘big picture’ of why we do this research as this is often forgotten day-to-day, but fundamentally gave the next generation of potential scientists an opportunity to engage with the drug discovery field from female scientists in STEM.