Welcome to the first Breaking Good newsletter!

Happy New Year from the team at Breaking Good! We’re excited to bring you the first of our quarterly newsletters and we hope that they'll help to connect and build our community, to share what we’ve been up to and to find new ways to collaborate with schools and members of the public.

Last year, we were set to expand our schools outreach program and were thrilled to grow our team here at the University of Sydney and welcome Dr Yaela Golumbic and Dr Kymberley Scroggie to help build the project (look out for a meet the team feature in our next newsletter). While things didn’t quite turn out as anyone expected in 2020, we had a very busy and productive year. We worked with a team of undergraduates at the University of Sydney to make new medicines for the Open Source Malaria consortium, reached ~500 school students in online workshops and built a new online community of over 100 participants as part of our new E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ project.

This year we want to collaborate with you again on lots of fun citizen science and education projects. By making molecules that matter and investigating equity of access to medicines together, we hope to make a positive impact on human health, to learn more science and have fun along the way.

Please keep in touch and join us for some of the events we have planned over the next few months.

Alice

Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, Westpac Research Fellow and Director of Breaking Good

Breaking (Good) News

Launch of the E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ project

The COVID-19 pandemic may have interrupted our work with young people in research laboratories in 2020, but it also reminded us of a central theme of our work at Breaking Good: access to medicines. We designed a new online citizen science project exploring access to the Essential Medicines, those that the World Health Organisation have classified as essential for a functioning healthcare system. Everyone should have access to these medicines and at affordable prices...but we know that this is not always the case. We started the E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ project to invite citizen scientists to gather information about medicine accessibility and pricing around the world, starting with the USA and Australia.

Our three new challenges will send you on a pursuit of information investigating news appearances, price changes and the history of the essential medicines.

Find out more here or click on a challenge below to take it on today!

Synthesis at Sydney Uni

Late last year Special Sutdies Students were hard at work in the laboratories at the University of Sydney, where they synthesised 6 brand new compounds that will be tested against the malaria parasite and contribute to the Open Source Malaria consortium.

The compounds have been sent off for testing to determine if they have any antimalarial activity - watch this space!

Find out more here.

Schools Workshops

We ran two really fun school workshop's last year. The first was in partnership with the University of Sydney and Future Anything and invited the 420(!) student participants to design their very own innovative solutions to reduce the burden of malaria.

The second explored E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ with 45 high school students who wowed us with their ideas and fabulous presentations and had this to say about the day:

“it is a great experience for students to explore the world of medicine”
“I really liked how the information we learnt about essential medicines could be referred to it's usage in real-life”
“I have learnt what essential medicine is in depth and understood the significance and impact of these products

Check out future Grand Challenge events here and our next E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ workshop here.

Teachers' Space

We've added a place on our website specifically for school teachers interested in Breaking Good. It's your one stop shop for infomation on how to get involved, upcoming Breaking Good activities tailored for school students and other opportunities. Check it out here!

Keep up-to-date with Breaking Good news on our website

Upcoming Events for Teachers

Teacher Info Session

Interested in joining the Breaking Good Project but don't know how? The team will be hosting two free information sessions for teachers where you can find out more!

Join us to discover how Breaking Good can inspire your Year 9 to 12 students

Date: Monday 1st March, 2021

Time: 4:00 PM and 6:40 PM (45 minute sessions)

Where: Zoom (details upon reigstration)

Cost: Free!

E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ Workshop

After the success of our last E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ workshop (read all about it here), we are running another one on March the 17th!

During the workshop students will learn the stories behind world's most important medicines and engage in the E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ citizen science project that helps make medicines more accessible. All of our school programs map to the Australian curriculum to help best support students attending.

Find out more and register here

Follow us!

Part of the University of Sydney members of the Breaking Good Initative during National Science Week preparations 2020 at the School of Chemistry. From left to right: Sebastian Leach, Dr. Yaela Golumbic, Prof. Peter Rutledge, Hung Phat Duong, Dr. Shane Wilkinson, Dr. Kymberley Scroggie, A/Prof. Alice Motion.

Brought to you by the Breaking Good Team with support from the School of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and the Drug Discovery Institute at the University of Sydney and funding from the Google Impact Challenge Australia.

breakinggoodproject.com | thebreakingoodproject@gmail.com

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