• Question: what will you use the money for? would you give some to charity or not ?

    Asked by fruee001 to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by feyi9080.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      I’m a big fan of the charity Mind (http://www.mind.org.uk/get_involved/enewsletters?gclid=COOa9au87bUCFc3HtAodoQ4AmA) who help people with mental health difficulties large and small, and as a Welsh person I like them most because they have a Welsh-language service which is rare.

      I would give some money to them, and use some of the money to produce videos of brain lectures to put on-line so that children all over the country can watch them, not just the children I reach in Bristol.

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      While I will give some money to charity (probably Crohns and Colitis, which is researching for a cure to some quite nasty diseases) I am planning on using most of the money to go into schools with robots and show how cool robotics research can be, and encourage as many students as possible to get into science.

    • Photo: Ben Brilot

      Ben Brilot answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      In all honesty, I don’t have a really great idea for how to use it yet. I’d like to do something that helps educates schoolkids (and their parents) about the new science of animal welfare and how we can now begin to look at whether animals are suffering (or, importantly, are ‘happy’ with their conditions). I’m still not certain of the best place to do this (local museums? supermarkets? zoos?), but I’m working on it.

      On the charity bit: the people who organise “I’m a Scientist” say that the prize money is “to be spent on a science communication project, to publicise or communicate the scientist’s research or research area”. So it can be given to a charity, so long as the charity will use it for science communication. That makes it a bit tricky for me, since lots of the charities that protect animals object to using them in scientific research, even if it’s to help the animals’ own welfare.

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