Emma, Becks, Kika, Martin, and Joe are running a half marathon on 10th September to raise money for the Fiona Foundation, which was set up after my mum died, after a long fight with breast cancer, in 2011 to help causes that were important to her, which primarily involves helping women in chemical engineering and STEM more broadly.

This has included a scholarship for women for low socioeconomic backgrounds studying chemical engineering at Newcastle University (which is where my mum studied) as well as outreach programmes to encourage pre-GCSE girls to think about studying STEM at a higher level. We have also partnered with St Andrews University in a project called Cell-Block Science, which involves researchers from the university going into prisons and teaching the inmates about different topics in science in which the researchers are specialists. The Fiona Foundation specially funds the Beyond The Walls part of this project which funds prisoners’ family members to come into the prison so the prisoner can teach them what they have learnt in each class. This is beneficial for both inmate and family and there are lots of studies showing the benefits of education in prison for both offenders and their family. This project has been done in make prisoners in previous years, but we will be funding it specifically for women’s prisons in the future.