NUFFIELD RESEARCH PLACEMENTS

NUFFIELD RESEARCH PLACEMENTS

The Nuffield Foundation provides opportunities for secondary school students to work alongside professional scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians (STEM) every summer. The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism hosted its first Nuffield research placement in 2018, which was a great success and brought positive experiences for both the lab and the student. In 2019, we hosted two secondary school students on the six-week research placements.

Sermad Kadhum (from Hyndland Secondary School) and Zainab Azad (from Notre Dame High School) joined us over the summer. They worked with PhD student, Yu Wei Chua, Hawthorne Fellow, Dr Szu-Ching Lu, and the lab director, Dr Jonathan Delafield-Butt, to design and program a new smartphone game. This game is fun for kids to play and able to detect movement signatures in their gameplay that could potentially be used to detect autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The smartphone game employed a cartoon bakery theme developed in Xcode with the Swift programming language and was implemented on an iPhone for testing and demonstration. This was impressive work that required computer programming skills, as well as a growing appreciation of developmental conditions. Sermad and Zainab made posters to showcase their hard work at the Nuffield Celebration Event in Edinburgh.

These Nuffield research placements increase the accessibility of higher education research culture to young students and afford an experience to propel their motivation towards reaching out and achieving enrolment in a higher education institution. Both young people intend to study for higher degrees, in medicine or in biomedical science.

Sermad and Zainab’s work now serves as a foundation for future research carried forward in the lab, which can help us better understand the motor control in children with ASD utilizing smartphone applications. The utilization of emerging technologies will provide new insight into core disruptions to movement in autism, which is important for early detection, therapeutic, and educational gains.

Capture: Zainab (at the front) with members of the Laboratory for Innovation in Autism

Capture: Poster presentation and smartphone game demonstration at the Nuffield Celebration Event in Edinburgh

Nuffield Research Placements https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/ nuffield-research-placements

Laboratory for Innovation in Autism https://www.strath.ac.uk/research/innovationinautism/