Middle school students rocked the Faculty of Pharmacy
“Everything was just super exciting,” says Alice Mankert, one of four middle school students from Uppsala Music Classes who in early February visited the Faculty of Pharmacy to learn more about frontline pharmaceutical research and also performed a much-lauded rock concert at the Pharmen Student union building.
Monday 6 February, the Faculty of Pharmacy hosted four highly valued guests as Alice, David, Nadia and Valter, middle school students at Uppsala Music Classes, visited the Uppsala Biomedical Center and Pharmen Student union building. During the day, the students took part in frontline research with a focus on the development of new antibiotics, 3D printers that create individual customised drugs and a potential technology to cure cancer with a needle stick.
“It was amazing to see how many talented pharmaceutical researchers there are in our own city. Everything was just super exciting, but if I have to choose one thing, the robot lab was probably the coolest. I especially liked the part about the robot learning from its own experiments, and it was great fun when it waved goodbye to us as we were leaving,” says Alice Mankert.
The day concluded with a visit to Pharmen, where the Pharmaceutical Student Union greeted the seventh graders with a full-scale rock concert. On the ballroom stage were none other than Fat Cotton, Uppsala University's hardest working Rock'n'Roll trio with the Faculty's own Per Hansson on guitar & vocals, Vice-Chancellor Anders Hagfeldt on drums and Professor Tomas Edvinsson on bass. In honor of the occasion, former Vice-Chancellor Anders Hallberg also picked up the guitar and, together with the middle school students, performed a much-lauded version of the Jimi Hendrix classic Stone Free.
“We strive to prioritise our outreach activities and to increase interest in our faculty's education. Today's visit was a lot of fun and I’m quite convinced that our young guests really appreciated taking part in our research and the activities at Pharmen. I also want to express our appreciation to Anders Hagfeldt, Anders Hallberg, Per Hansson and Tomas Edvinsson, who helped us put an extra silver lining on the children's visit,” says Dean Mathias Hallberg, who together with Deputy dean Anja Sandström guided the guests through the day.
The visit from Uppsala Music Classes was immortalised on film. Partly to give the students a memory of their day at the Faculty of Pharmacy, but also to show other potential future pharmaceutical experts a taste of everything that is going on in the Faculty's research groups. The film will be published on the Faculty of Pharmacy website but you can already see a clip from Pharmen here.
Magnus Alsne