OUTREACH

Come and talk with us about Science !

You have questions, wondering how a lab works, how does it look like, and if you are a student you might wonder what it takes to have a career in science and medical research. Come and visit during open day and special events during the year. We always enjoy engaging with the community as this enable us to share our love of science and show you our work.

Day of Immunology – May 2022

we organise the Day of Immunology at LIMS to welcome the public into our Institutes and showcase our research. Such a great way to share our passion for science and hopefully inspire the next generation of medical researchers.

Day of Immunology

International Women Day – March 2022

A special event to meet the La Trobe scholars making the connections between gender, social equity and climate change, highlighting actions and solutions that will help us build a more sustainable future.

International Woman Day – March 2021

Despite the cold, rain, and ongoing pandemic, we have manage to join outside and talk about the importance of diversity, gender equality and equity in our work place. We join for a cup of coffee to celebrate the International Woman Day and even managed to take a group picture to show our engagement.

Welcome to Year 10 students – February 2020

In February we had the pleasure to welcome the year 10 students from Glen Waverley school. Christopher Szeto who was a student in that school explained to the students his career from his own year 10 to his work as a research fellow in the lab today. Then we welcome the student in the lab and show them few techniques that we are doing routinely in the lab. Always a great experience to welcome young student in the lab.

Day of Immunology – May 2019

Every year the April 29 is the International Day of Immunology! In 2019 that day was very close with the long Easter break and ANZAC day, so to make sure we could have a maximum students available to come and visit us in the lab, it was decide to do the Day Of Immunology activities on the 8th of may.

For us this day represents an opportunity to share our love of science with the general public, and this year with High School Students from MacRobertson Girls’ and from John Monash Science School. After some introduction talks about Monash and the research undertake within our institute, Stephanie gave a talk about the Real Hero of our life: The immune system 😉 explaining the importance and role of the immune cells that help us remain healthy and fight off infections on a daily basis.

A great day to inspire a new generation of scientist, and for Stephanie a perfect time to use The Avengers and Game of Thrones as reference to explain the immune system 😉 Never forget how much fun science is, and how privileged are the people like us able to do science and research as our job ;-).

Cancer cells are like “White walkers”, they are refusing to die and multiply to take over.

Then it was time to welcome the students into the labs, and Chris Szeto explained our John Monash’s students the work we are doing in the lab and how we all got into Science. Overall some different road led by the desire to help the community and understand how the immune system works, great to hear everyone’s journey !!!

After a safety briefing we got the students to rotate between 3 different stations where we prepared some hands on activities for them.

First Station: SDS-Page Protein Gel loading (by Chris L & Hayden). Trying to see the well and placing a small volume into them while the pipette tip is in solution, tricky exercise.

Second Station: Spreading bacteria on petri dish (by Andrea & Dhilshan). We explained how to grow bacteria cells to the students and show them how it start, with small colonies (like little white dot) on a plate. Using red food dye to observed their technique made the job easier.

Third Station: Cell counting (by Hannah & Dimitra). To perform our assay we need to know how many cells we manage to collect from blood, or how many cells are growing from our mammalian cells culture. We prepared some cells for the students to count under the miscroscope.