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ONCAMPUS Experts Talk: Life and Health Sciences at Aston

Good morning everyone, I'm Peter McLaughlin, ONCAMPUS Partnership and Progression Director. Thank you very much for your strong interest. This is a new ONCAMPUS partner. Aston University is one of the UK's most outstanding universities.

The Biosciences has been an important part of that aspect of research and impact and even further development in the area of Biomedical and Biotechnology. So if I can give you a little bit more background as to the course. Biosciences as an ecosystem throughout the world has been a very significant development, particularly everything coming to thefore with the recent, the current pandemic that we're having, where a lot of focus has relied upon the expertise, the research, and the industry that is linked in to biomedical and biosciences.

So the ecosystem itself is very dominant in the UK because UK is one of the world's leading thought leadership and research centers and implementation of Applied Sciences in this field of Sciences. So Aston University has for a long time been a significant contributor to that research and development and the success of all the programmes at Aston is well proven with its recent accomplishment as being one of the outstanding entrepreneurial universities and university of the year 2020. What's interesting about the work that Aston does, particularly in this field of research, is that much of what they're doing is Applied Sciences to the real world. The real research impact that we're seeing even today with the vaccination programmes for COVID and the immunisation, all this contributing to the significant accomplishments in the work that universities such as Aston have been doing for quite a few years now. With ONCAMPUS, what's interesting is a lot of students wanting to join the Life Sciences ecosystem and become a graduate, working in the industry or research itself and pharmaceutical and the like. They tend to opt for Biochemistry or for Biomedical but as you can see, there's a whole range of opportunities for students with Aston, with Biological Sciences. Postgraduates, what you will notice with the Master's and the MSC's with Aston is that they are particularly applied to the regenerative and the applied aspects of what we consider to be ongoing, crucial research and there you see its focus, particularly on conditions, health conditions, ageing disease and illnesses and that's one of the speciality of Aston. Particularly with its focus on regenerative medicine and stem cells and regenerative medicine in the field of doctorate research as well. What's an amazing accomplishment, is the energy and the vibrancy that you see with Aston, across all its faculties and all its subject areas, and particularly in the field of biosciences because it has such a high level of rankings, not just as a University overall, in the top 100 or so in different league tables, but from the faculty itself. The school of Biosciences actually has one of the highest rankings for graduate salaries, more than many other UK or European universities and that's shown with the evidence of the average salary, which is about 33k after five years of graduation, which in UK terms is quite respectable. So what's very important is the Gold Award for its Teaching Excellence and even if you look at some of the top UK universities in the league tables, you'll find that they may only have silver. So well done Aston on the gold award.

So in terms of general rankings, tremendous accomplishments being made in all areas, particularly if we're focusing on the biological sciences and the biosciences, you'll see that it's up in the top ranking on the top 25, whether the Sunday Times, Guardian, Good University guide. For graduate prospects, with its focus on entrepreneurial achievement and accomplishment for all its students embedded into its curriculum, it's in the top 10. Student satisfaction, very important indeed to be looking at when students research universities. Again, the biomedical science faculty has one of the highest ranking, almost 93%/95% of its students found the course intellectually stimulating. So that means you've got high student satisfaction, which makes a real difference to the overall outcome of the, not just the results, but also the purpose that students have a sense of purpose and focus and mission when they graduate.

The course structure for biomedical sciences is that you have the three or four year programme. The three year programme will be straight taught programmes and modules. The four year is very important to mention because this is a specialism, particularly of Aston university, where it provides the option of a placement year, like a year in industry, and this is what Aston does extremely well. Outstanding in its delivery of giving options to students across all their subjects and all their faculties for this optional placement here. Biosciences and the faculty here, because you've got Aston Research Park, you've got Birmingham Research Park, you've got a huge investment that's also being targeted for the Midlands and Birmingham is the centre of what will become one of the world's, or the UK's and one of the world's life science and health care clusters and this makes all the attractions of the placement year very exciting.

The core modules that are covered on the biomedical courses will be probably focused, particularly on whichstudents can then select in their third year, their research project. The research project is a very important part of their third year and they could start earlier on that if they wish. But it's important that students are given the option to choose their project area and there's a lot of peer to peer work that goes on where topics and subjects that are chosen for the undergraduate research project are actually linked to the research overall for the University at Master's or even PhD level. So you've got an integration of research and thisis quite exceptional and Aston has achieved this very well. So students graduating with their first degree will actually have very, very deep skills, professional skills, academic research skills, that's been acquired, that you would normally have to wait for a Master's or postgraduate. They have a live area to work on, tapping into the huge expertise that's found in those research centres, for postgraduate level, but having an impact for them to actually write up their first dissertation and the first research project at undergraduate level. So all the programmes carry credits, obviously, and the research project has to have a practical aspect because the assessments for Aston biosciences, obviously there'll be exams, different assessment modes. You're going to have essays, you'll have practical and lab reports, which is an important part, presentations, but again, peer assessment, which is an important part of their assessment programmes and giving students opportunity to learn more.

Aston has a very strong relationship with the local employment because Birmingham has always been a centre for life sciences and biomedical research for startups and companies, and all these local employers will be sponsors to the University through its excellent career service. Aston again, only recently was voted as number one in terms of the quality of its career services to students, and that's for general advice, but also the opportunity of a placement here. Students who study and become graduates in the field of Sciences or biomedical will actually be awarded as well, as long as they matriculate and graduate with dual accreditation of what are considered to be professional qualifications and the most important one is the IBMS. By graduating with their degree, they will become registered, they can apply for registration and membership of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, and that also brings forward the registration with the HCPC and that's the Health Care Council, and that allows all graduates of biosciences to go into the field of clinical research, go into the field of employability with companies and corporations, and those accreditations are internationally and globally recognised and will give students that employability status for greater things to come.

Thank you again, everyone, for listening. Look out for more about our series and have a great day. Thank you very much.