Thanks for supporting the Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme (URSS) at Warwick

Donations like yours help fund these placements, allowing undergraduates with a skill and interest in academic research take on real-world projects with leading academics. They make contributions to the field of academia and get a taste of life as a researcher too.

In the summer of 2014, student Sarah Chen undertook a special project in the Trace Metals in Medicine laboratory at Warwick. Her goal was to help Dr Joanna Collingwood's research into Alzheimer's disease.

In scientific terms, she aimed to optimise a microfluidic system that would enable the evaluation of the interaction between metals and the amyloid protein fragment that aggregates and is deposited in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients as amyloid plaques. Your donations helped fund both her work and some of the equipment including programmable pumps, and supervisor Joanna says:

This URSS project was particularly timely as our group has made a lot of recent progress in collaboration with colleagues Neil Telling and James Everett at Keele University, studying the interactions between iron and the amyloid protein fragment in a variety of different scenarios.

Our recent published work indicates that this interaction may be responsible for some of the damage to brain cells observed in Alzheimer’s disease. The microfluidic system that Sarah significantly advanced during her URSS project will now be used to investigate a range of ways in which this damaging process might be modified, exploring options for potential future treatments.

Thank you for your support for the Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme - you're helping us to train the researchers of tomorrow.