IMI Summer School 

The IMI Summer School aims to give year 12 students an immersive experience of microbiology and infectious disease research at the Institute of Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham. The summer school runs for one week and hosts 30 students for their ‘work experience’ week.  Students are currently admitted from the University of Birmingham School, which is a modern, inclusive school and admits students from a variety of catchment areas in Birmingham.  

What the students enjoyed about the summer school

Students loved our pipetting exercise, where they weighed quantities of water they had pipetted to see how accurate they could be, and using the vortex. They loved the chance to get into a university lab, wear university lab coats and work with modern equipment. They enjoyed the range of different activities that were delivered and individual students mentioned different favourite events, from lectures, to wet lab to dry lab experiences. Each student had come to the Summer School with their own set of interests and had a chance to explore these more, as well as discover some potential new ones, by learning about research going on at the university. One of the students enjoyed a lecture so much he asked to come back later in the summer and shadow one of our PIs to learn more about the field and figure out which courses he wants to take at university.   

SS - Lab 2

 SS- Lab

Students loved the chance to get into a university lab, wear university lab coats and work with modern equipment.

ss eXPERIMENTS

Students worked on a bacterial conjugation experiment. 

SS - Covid poster 1

The students were tasked with working in their groups to come up with a poster that communicated a message to the public about COVID-19. 

SS - Lab 3

SS - Petri dishes

We partnered with the Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to link the students to the established UK-wide Swab and Send Initiative. This initiative asked the students to swab their environment for microbes, which the Liverpool team then grew and tested for production of antimicrobial compounds.

SS- Computer science

Mathematical modelling of an outbreak.

SS - Covid poster 2

 

SS - Lucy Crouch

SS Leaf

The students worked on culturing microbes from leaves. 

ss Pipette


Students especially enjoyed our pipetting exercise and using the vortex.
 

The 2022 IMI Summer school participants SS - Summer school final day