We recently announced the winners of our In2scienceUK public engagement competition. For our ‘How STEM makes a difference’ category, we tasked participants on the In2STEM programme to write a blog post on why their area of STEM is important. Read Melissa’s entry, which won the In2STEM 2025 blog prize, in full below, all about her experience on her summer placement.
My In2STEM host was a senior research assistant for UCL’s Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, where I was privileged to witness how she uses mice to investigate different aspects of the human brain. Her research was specifically focused on the occipital lobe of the brain to see how mice respond to different stimuli (different pictures on a screen) based on receiving a reward (a food pellet). She monitored this as the mouse spun on a wheel to move the different sequence of pictures forward, while tiny electrodes were injected into the mouse’s brain! Her research, along with many others at the SWC, will help us understand more about the complex structure and unexplained functions of the human brain. This will have an enormous impact on how we develop treatments for patients who have neurological or neurodegenerative diseases – for example, Alzheimer’s disease, which is diagnosed every 65 seconds!
I was also able to uncover the broad and extensive careers that relate to Neuroscience by having the opportunity to meet lots of physicists and computer scientists who work alongside the researchers. They help create data tools and specialise in neuroinformatics to help researchers collect and analyse huge amounts of data. I was especially impressed at seeing how minuscule a crab’s and a mouse’s brain is in comparison to a manta ray, not to mention the strange shape, which looked like a deformed jellyfish!
What really struck me during my In2STEM placement was the scale of the impact this type of research could have. At first, it just looked like a mouse spinning on a wheel, but I quickly realised that those tiny movements were giving scientists powerful insights into how the brain processes vision, reward and learning. These discoveries don’t just help us understand diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s – they could also change the way we approach mental health, education, and even how we design technology. For example, knowing more about how the brain reacts to rewards might improve treatments for addiction or help create better strategies for motivating learning in schools.
Another thing I hadn’t expected was how much collaboration goes into Neuroscience. I imagined scientists working alone in labs, but instead I saw teams of physicists, computer scientists and biologists working side by side. This opened my eyes to how interconnected STEM fields are, and how progress in one area often depends on knowledge from another. It also made me realise there are so many different career paths within neuroscience – from building software to analyse data, to running experiments, to applying discoveries in medicine.
Looking back, this experience has made me appreciate just how important Neuroscience is for society. The brain is so small compared to the rest of the body, yet it controls everything we do and makes us who we are. Understanding it better doesn’t just mean curing diseases; it means improving everyday life in ways people might not expect. My In2STEM placement has inspired me to keep exploring this field and shown me that even the tiniest discoveries in the lab can have a huge impact on the world.