This year the Milner Institute was delighted to take part in the University of Cambridge’s interdisciplinary Cambridge Festival. The Festival takes place each Spring and includes a mixture of online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at Cambridge.
On 16th March, we joined forces with the CRUK Cambridge Centre at the Big Biomedical Campus family day, where Milner Head of Research Nicola McCarthy and postdoctoral researcher Fatima Baldo invited visitors to play “The CRISPR Game”, allowing players to discover how scientists are using gene-editing technologies to find new therapies for cancer. Over 1,000 visitors attended the event at the Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology (CAST) and the cancer-themed activities reached around 10,000 engagements. As an Affiliated Institute of the CRUK Cambridge Centre, we were proud to support this event for the second year running.
We were also pleased to showcase our own in-house research at the Cambridge Festival this year, in a separate event held on 26th March. For this event, Nicola McCarthy was joined by Namshik Han, our Head of Computational Biology and AI, to deliver “Functional genomics and AI: super sleuths in the search for new therapies”. The talks gave an overview of functional genomics and explored why AI (artificial intelligence/machine learning) is key to its interpretation, with Nicola and Namshik taking audience members on a tour through these new areas of medical research.
Feedback from both Cambridge Festival events was very positive, and we look forward to taking part again next year!
