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Community collaboration came to the fore in two special events involving youngsters from local schools working with QE staff and pupils.

QE’s youngest boys were joined by Year 7 pupils from The Totteridge Academy, Barnet, for a fun challenge in the laboratories – the Chemystery Conundrum.

Year 5 children from six primary schools also came to The Queen’s Library for an event that focused on creative writing and encouraging reading for pleasure.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “QE is deeply rooted in the community as a Barnet school, and we value our local partnerships. It was good to welcome some younger students from other schools and to host these two very different events!”

The Chemystery Conundrum, overseen by the Chemistry department, took place in the S11 and S12 laboratories.

Some 60 pupils from the two schools looked at modern drug design, with teams challenged to find solutions to get a medicine to dissolve in the stomach in 20 seconds.

They were given guidance on how to design an experiment to respond to the challenge. To present their findings, they were asked to produce a poster with diagrams and minimal text. Each member of the team was required to speak.

QE’s Head of Chemistry, Amy Irvine, said: “This was designed as a collaborative, hands-on, experimental work. The pupils from the two schools worked really well together, coming up with a range of good solutions, with support from some of our A-level chemists.”

The event for the Year 5 children was aimed at encouraging them to read more. It began with quiz questions centred on how to choose a book, covering areas such as cover designs, ‘blurbs’ and genres.

Sixth Form students Aarav Agarwal and Simi Bloom then led a creative writing session.

They used word-association and word-chain games, as well as showing the children objects intended to inspire and kickstart stories. Year 12’s Aarav and Simi looked at character and setting, generally encouraging the children to let their imagination run free.

• Click thumbnails to view images: the Chemystery Conundrum first, followed by photos from the event in the library.

Queen Elizabeth’s School extended its proud record in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Top of the Bench competition with victory in the regional final.

One team, pictured top, took first place – and thus qualified for the national finals in the spring – with a score of 40 out of 43. Another QE team was only one point behind, beating Harrow and Watford Grammar School for Boys into joint third place.

QE has frequently achieved success in the competition throughout its 20-year history.

Head of Chemistry Amy Irvine said: “It was a splendid performance by our winning team, who beat more than 50 other teams to take first place – and in the UK’s national Chemistry Week, too! Furthermore, all five of our teams came in the top ten, so we demonstrated real strength in depth.”

Congratulating all the QE entrants, Myles Worsley, an RSC Chilterns and Middlesex Section committee member, commented on the “excellent” scores of the winners and runners-up. “They showed an impressive knowledge and understanding of Chemistry,” he said.

Top of the Bench is open to every secondary school in the UK. Teams must comprise: two students from Year 9; one from Year 10, and one from Year 11.

This year’s regional finals, conducted over Zoom, featured six rounds. The early stages of these tested entrants’ general Chemistry knowledge, covering topics such as atoms and compounds.

Other rounds included:

• Examining practical knowledge: competitors had to identify different compounds from the results of different analytical tests;
• Asking different questions to each year group. (The Year 11 question, which was about equilibria, was particularly tricky, Dr Irvine said.);
• Testing knowledge of the atmosphere and gases, with, for example, entrants having to identify carbon monoxide as a ‘silent killer’;

The final round involved further testing of general Chemistry knowledge. Competitors had to identify the main compound in smelling salts.

“This caused me much amusement, as some of the boys were discussing what the difference was between baths salts and smelling salts!” Dr Irvine said.

The winning team, Team 35, comprised: Aaditya Pimple and Varenya Pangaluri, of Year 9; Arhaan Yadav, of Year 10; and Yash Mehta, of Year 11.

They win Amazon vouchers, as well as the honour of representing the School in the national finals, to be held at a university: this year’s venue has yet to be named.

The QE teams’ scores and positions were:

Team 35:  40/43 – first

Team 36:  37.5/43 – fourth

Team 37:  39/43 – second

Team 38:  31/43 – ninth

Team 39:  33.5/43 – seventh

Old Elizabethan Sir Demis Hassabis has been awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, jointly with a colleague at the AI company he founded and with an American scientist.

Demis (OE 1988–1990), who is the co-founder and CEO of AI company Google DeepMind, receives half of the prize with his DeepMind colleague, Dr John Jumper, for their work on predicting complex protein structures. The other half of the prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes to Professor David Baker, from the University of Washington, for his work on protein design.

In their statement, the prize committee wrote: “Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

“Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.

“In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.”

The Nobel Committee emphasised the global impact of AlphaFold2. It has been accessed by more than two million researchers from 190 countries. Examples of its many applications include: helping scientists to understand better antibiotic resistance; and creating images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Reacting to the news, Demis, 48, said: “It’s totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming.”

He explained the “funny sequence” through which he actually heard the news that he was a Nobel laureate. Since the committee did not apparently have a telephone number for him, they had reached him through a Teams call to his wife, who was working on her laptop at the time. After at first ignoring it, she answered it at around the third or fourth call. The caller then requested to be put in touch with Demis, whom they asked for Dr Jumper’s number.

Demis thanked his colleagues, including Dr Jumper, adding: “David Baker we’ve got to know in the last few years, and he’s done some absolutely seminal work in protein design. So it’s really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them.”

The Nobel prize committee praised the work of Professor Baker, which he began in 2003, saying that he had “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

The committee’s statement concluded: “Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.”

The illustration above shows a selection of protein structures determined using AlfaFold2 (©Terezia Kovalova/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

• The scientific background to the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry can be read here. A popular-level introduction is available here.

Four QE scientists headed to Scotland for the national final of a Royal Society of Chemistry competition.

After successfully battling through the regional heats of the long-running Top of the Bench competition, the team took on competitors from around the country at Edinburgh Napier University.

The weekend included not only the competition rounds themselves – a written test and a laboratory-based practical – but also a lecture, a prizegiving ceremony and an address from the RSC President, Professor Gill Reid.

QE’s Head of Chemistry Amy Irvine said: “Our students worked brilliantly together as a team and impressed with their fantastic chemistry knowledge and skills.

“It was a closely fought competition with little to separate the teams, and although they were not named among the eventual winners, getting to the final was itself a huge achievement.

“Moreover, they had a great time sampling university life in the labs and lecture theatres.”

The team comprised Year 11’s Zayn Phoplankar; Vu-lam Le-Nguyen, of Year 10; and Aarush Choudhary and Rishan Virmani, both of Year 9.

They reached the national final after scoring 66 points out of a maximum possible 72 in the Chilterns and Middlesex round of the competition during the autumn.

The four travelled by train to the national final. After the four-and-a-half journey from King’s Cross to the Scottish capital on the East Coast Main Line, they spent Friday evening exploring and relaxing prior to the start of the competition the next day.

“They were excited to see the beautiful Edinburgh old town,” said Dr Irvine. “They then headed back to the hotel, just off the Royal Mile, after a much-needed Nando’s!”

Water was the theme of this year’s Top of the Bench – a competition open to all UK secondary schools that has been running for more than 20 years.

On the Saturday morning, the students completed a written paper with questions that covered areas ranging from separating techniques to neutralisation.

The afternoon brought a team practical assessment. “They had a chance to show their separating technique and have a go at a redox titration – normally an A-level topic!” Dr Irvine added.

The keynote lecture on Chemical engineering to produce clean drinking water came before the competitors heard from Professor Reid.

Two Old Elizabethan medics are working with the School to trial an innovative education app that uses AI to support both pupils and their teachers.

QE contemporaries Kavi Samra and Paul Jung (both 2008–2015) have developed Medly AI to help pupils from backgrounds like theirs who may not have access to all the educational resources available to others.

They only started working on the business in August, yet already it has won funding and been accepted into Microsoft’s start-up programme.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “We are very pleased to be working with Kavi and Paul as they develop this exciting venture that is showing great potential to support our boys, and other young people, with their consolidation and revision.”

After approaching the School about trialling the app with QE pupils, the pair had a meeting with the Headmaster and with Gillian Ridge and Amy Irvine, Heads of Biology and Chemistry respectively, in which they demonstrated the platform and introduced its teacher mode. “This is where teachers are able to set questions (from a large database, or their own custom questions) to their respective classes for homework, or in a test format,” said Kavi.

Medley AI can then:

• Understand the questions
• Work out how they fit into the curriculum of the subject
• Assign them to a specification point
• Mark the students’ answers.

“From here, the teacher can get in-depth statistical insights into each student’s weak topics, topic by topic and class by class. This then enables them to customise their classroom teaching according to class-wide weak topics and, of course, saves an incredible amount of time in terms of marking student work.

“Both Dr Irvine and Dr Ridge seemed quite impressed and were eager to start using Medly as a resource to save time and understand where their students don’t perform well.”

‘Onboarding’ for the Year 11 group took place before Christmas, and Paul and Kavi will now be working with the Science department. “This will involve teachers setting homework on the platform and providing feedback on what they’d like to see in our teacher mode to help us improve the platform,” said Kavi. “The students will, of course, have access to our base platform, too, in case they wish to do additional learning or practise questions or exams.”

“We’ve always wanted to try to democratise education,” says Kavi. “Medly AI was born from the vision of making quality education accessible and personalised through the power of AI. Both Paul and I noticed throughout our education how people often had advantages from their socio-economic background in terms of educational resources (e.g personal tuition): both of us come from backgrounds that didn’t allow us access to these resources.

“Recognising the gaps in traditional educational systems due to work pressures on teachers and staffing issues, we saw the potential of AI to fill these gaps and therefore conceptualised a platform that could act as a personal tutor, examiner, and classroom assistant, all integrated into one user-friendly interface.”

Paul is responsible for writing code and working on the technical side of the project, while Kavi takes on operations.

After just two months of development, Microsoft admitted Medly AI to its programme, providing Kavi and Paul with mentoring from a business development manager and meeting the costs of the platform up to £150,000. A month later, the project was also accepted into UCL’s Hatchery start-up accelerator, enabling its professional fees for legal, IP and accounting costs to be funded.

Both Paul and Kavi have deep connections with UCL. Paul holds a PhD in Neuropsychiatry from the university, and has an extensive background in coding and teaching. He included AI in his research, on which he has published and given international presentations. He has returned to his medical degree at UCL and is in his final year, completing his MBBS in August.

Kavi, who currently works as a doctor in anaesthetics, completed his medical degree at UCL in 2021 and is a clinical teacher within its medical school: his approaches to using teaching theory in a digital age earned him an Associate Fellowship of Higher Education Award from UCL and he is also one of the youngest recipients of an honorary fellow contract at UCL.

A QE team will go to the national finals of a Royal Society of Chemistry competition after beating off fierce competition to win their regional heat.

Team 38 (pictured top) scored 66 out of a maximum possible 72 – or 92% – to take first place ahead of St Benedict’s School, on 65 points, in the Chilterns and Middlesex round of the Top of the Bench competition.

In joint third place, with 64 points apiece, were three other QE teams and a team from Harrow School.

Head of Chemistry Amy Irvine said: “We are very proud of the four boys in the winning team – what an achievement!”

Describing team 38’s score as “magnificent”, Paul Tiley, from the RSC’s Chilterns and Middlesex Local Section Committee, added: “We were very impressed with their knowledge and understanding of Chemistry.”

The winning team comprised: Zayn Phoplankar, of Year 11; Vu-Lam Le-Nguyen, of Year 10; Aarush Choudhary, of Year 9, and Rishan Virmani, also of Year 9.

In addition to progressing to the national round of the competition in the spring, they win a silver shield and Amazon vouchers.

They were among a total of five teams entered by QE, all made up of boys from Years 9–11. All five finished among the top ten teams. “Their teamwork was exceptional, as they answered some very challenging Chemistry problems via Zoom,” said Dr Irvine.

The Top of the Bench competition is open to all secondary schools in the UK and has been running for more than 20 years.

Boys towards the bottom end of the School have been solving Chemistry problems of their own in the Year 7–9 Chemystery club (photos 2 & 3).

With a little help from sixth-formers, they determined the citric acid concentration in sour sweets – specifically, Swizzles Fizzers and Haribo Sour Sparks.

“The students solved this particular ‘mystery’ very well, with some excellent titration technique on display from the younger boys, supported by our brilliant Year 12 chemists,” Dr Irvine added.