Benjamin was also able to travel to the neighbouring islands of Samos and Lesvos to observe how other refugee camps functioned. He plans to take what he learned from his experience in Chios and apply it to his ambitions to work in the development sector. Other award holders such as Aneeska Sohal (2020, MSc Modern South Asian Studies) chose to expand the reach of her project by working in an online space. She received an award of £1000 to help her create a new series of her mental health podcast, responding to the crisis of mental wellbeing in students and young people, which has been greatly exacerbated by the pandemic. During the first lockdown in 2020, Aneeska interviewed higher education students about how their interests and outlets helped to ground and support their mental health. The resulting podcast series, All Things Mental Health, reached a global audience on Spotify and Apple podcasts after being featured by Students for Liberty, and led to a role as a Trustee for Aneeska with the mental health charity Student Minds. Aneeska’s Thatcher Development Award allowed her to mobilise leading clinical psychologists, higher education policy makers, activists, writers, researchers, mindfulness practitioners and more to create a second Listen to ‘All Things Mental Health’ series focused on specialist work supporting student mental health. She by scanning the QR code above was also able to commission a designer to create a cover for each episode to engage potential listeners. The episodes have now been downloaded over 2,000 times, a figure which does not include the streaming audience. Her work attracted the attention of Kings College London’s student mental health research network, SMaRteN, who have commissioned her to work with them on a third series of the podcast to be produced in 2022. “We have received some really moving feedback,” said Aneeska. “Students have stressed how helpful the episodes have been for them, in particular the Distress Tolerance in Young Minds episode with leading clinical psychologist Dr Anna Colton.” Aneeska’s funding allowed her to commission an illustrated cover image for each episode of the series
“We have been contacted by students from as far afield as the National Institute of Technology Calicut in Kohzikode, India, who are interested in our ‘by students, for students’ approach to tackling the subject. It’s been a pleasure to share the podcasts far and wide, and see students on the ground benefiting.” Following her work with the podcast and with Student Minds, Aneeska has recently accepted a new role leading a division of the national mental health charity Mind. Anna Yakovleva (2020, Graduate Entry Medicine) used her Development Award of £996 to make a difference in public health for vulnerable displaced populations and build Ukraine’s native capacity to sequence viruses including Covid-19 when she travelled to the country last summer to work with NGO Alliance for Public Health. In concert with the L.V Gromashevskiy Institute for Epidemiology, Anna and her team developed Oxford Nanopore-based genetic sequencing protocols for HIV and Hepatitis C suitable for use with mobile laboratories in low resource, hard to reach environments. With the help of a portable gel electrophoresis machine and accompanying reagents funded by her Development Award, Anna and her team were able to formulate the new protocols and begin assembly of the mobile sequencing lab, as well as completing sequencing for a survey of HIV and Hepatitis C in 164 injecting drug-using patients who had been internally displaced. Anna and the study’s director, Assistant Professor Tetyana Vasylyeva, are now performing
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