Claire Sand – a winner at 'Access to Understanding' competition
Ms Claire Sand, PhD student with Dr Manasi Nandi and Professor Sue Brain, Pharmacology & Therapeutics Group, Cardiovascular Division and BHF Centre of Research Excellence, won joint second prize last night, 11 March 2013, at The British Library and Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) science writing competition ‘Access to Understanding’.
Entrants to the 'Access to Understanding' competition were challenged to summarise a cutting-edge research article, communicating in a simple and accessible way what the research is, and why it matters, for a non-specialist audience the 'Access to Understanding' competition aims to raise awareness amongst researchers of the increasing importance to the general public of being able to understand the outcomes of research which they pay for.
Furthermore, it seeks to break down the barriers that highly technical research language presents to enabling understanding of research and encourages PhD students and early career post-doctoral researchers to develop their communications skills. Claire’s article on ‘Blood Vessels from the Skin: The New Frontier in Tissue Engineering’ (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America from Qingbo Xu’s group at King’s College London) will be freely available from Europe PMC.
Her article was selected for inclusion in the competition by the British Heart Foundation one of Europe PMC funders together with, among many others, Wellcome Trust, Arthritis Research UK, Cancer Research UK, European Research Council, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Medical Research Council, National Institute for Health Research, Parkinson’s UK.
Claire’s research is funded through the British Heart Foundation 4-year MRes/PhD programme in Cardiovascular Science at King’s College London.
Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) is a free, online, information resource for biomedical and life sciences researchers. It is backed by a growing number of European funders, who expect their supported researchers to make their published research available to the widest possible audience. It enables anyone with internet access to search and discover over 26 million abstracts and full-text articles from around the world Europe PMC is developed by the European Bioinformatics Institute, The British Library and The University of Manchester (Mimas and NacTeM).