Three SEMS undergraduate student research projects have been accepted for presentation at the prestigious UK-wide British Conference for Undergraduate Research, being hosted by the London School of Economics (LSE).

The students who will be presenting at the conference are Barbaros Zeren and Yash Vaghela, both first year students supervised by Dr Rehan Shah, and second year students Emma Nicolai, supervised by Dr Hussain-Ali Abid and Ms Xiang Li supervised jointly by Jesus Chavez and Prof Ana Sobrido.

Impressively, this is the second conference acceptance for Barbaros and Yash, in addition to their previous acceptance at the Institute of Mathematics' (IMA) Tomorrow's Mathematicians Today (TMT) undergraduate mathematics conference. Their project, catchily titled 'Sway and Play: The Mathematics of Playground Swinging', involves modelling a playground swing system as an elaborated pendulum to investigate the mechanism of the frequently adopted standing-squatting swing pumping strategy that is used to increase the amplitude of swinging, to help answer the fundamental research question "How do children swing?".

Emma, whose project is titled 'Optimizing Hybrid Airplane Propellers for Sustainable Air Travel: A Path Towards Climate-Neutral Aviation', is also an undergraduate co-creator who is part of the Queen Mary Centre for Undergraduate Research (QMCUR) board of students. Xiang's project on the other hand, is titled 'Enhancing Electrical Conductivity in Polyaniline (PANI): A Comprehensive Study on Doping from Acids to Metal Halides and Embedding Carbon Dots for Advanced Applications' and is being overseen by Jesus Chavez, one of Prof Sobrido's PhD students.

All of the students were selected following a grueling selection process undertaken by student members of the QMCUR overseen by Dr Giuseppe Viola. Dr Shah, Dr Ali Abid, Prof Sobrido and Dr Viola were extremely proud to learn of their students' success and their motivation and enthusiasm in getting their abstract submitted, on the brink of their first semester exams.

Moreover, it is also worth highlighting that the selection process was extremely competitive as the conference is open to undergraduate students from all UK universities studying any degree discipline. In the case of Barbaros and Yash's project for instance, the conference review panel noted that "this is a really interesting and well-explained piece of research! It is well-written in an engaging and lively way and is clearly accessible to multi-disciplinary conference participants. Well done!".

The students will present their work over the course of the two-day conference in April 2024 and will also be invited to a special evening dinner and reception as well as other networking events.