Industry experience

Jay Devlin - Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

My Natural Sciences course created an opportunity for me to do an international internship, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Australia. I worked for two months with a research group on microfluidics using acoustic (sound wave) technology, gaining experience through a hands-on approach by starting a small project set up by my tutor Professor Geoff Nash, Director of Natural Sciences.

The Natural Sciences degree encourages students to go into research by studying a wide range of subjects, and by having many opportunities to gain work experience in research before graduation. This means after graduation, a more flexible approach can be taken to finding a research area, and the learning curve for a relatively new area of science is not so steep. The RMIT research group had a wide range of research focuses, from cell biology to engineering of new acoustic techniques.

Professor Leslie Yeo of RMIT, who oversaw my internship, said: “Internships provide valuable opportunities for students not just to experience academic research first-hand but also to develop laboratory skills that students may not necessarily have the chance to acquire in an undergraduate programme. At the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory in RMIT, we involve our interns in the very same research projects that the postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows undertake to elucidate a deeper fundamental understanding of how high frequency acoustic waves can be harnessed for a wide range of applications across nanomaterials synthesis and manipulation, biosensing and drug delivery.”

Dr Amgad Rezk, who supervised my project, said about his own work: “We found these high frequency, non-audible sound waves, to be a very exciting platform for a variety of applications including pulmonary drug delivery via nebulisation, a miniaturised micro-centrifuge for blood separation and, more recently, as a platform for modulating the optical and electrical properties of atomically thin materials such as graphene and molybdenum disulphide.”

Travelling abroad for my internship has given me a fresh outlook on a different education system and allowed me to meet people and explore subjects that were not available in my home University. It gave me a taste of research and showed me how passionate people really are about their research - I spent a lot of time shadowing various people during their experiments with little to no prompting from my part; they were all incredibly keen to show me what they were doing! The whole experience was unique and fantastic - no other course that I know of offers internships like this one.