A Vice-President of LifeScan is to open the first Highland Science Festival. Dr Tito Bacarese-Hamilton, the company’s Vice-President of New Products and Platforms, will formally open the new Festival at 11.00 am on Saturday 3 November, at the lecture-room in the UHI Executive Office at Ness Walk, Inverness.

Dr Bacarese-Hamilton is a clinical biochemist, with over 20 years research and industrial experience in the medical and life sciences. He is an honorary researcher at Imperial College London. He has devoted his research career to the study of diagnostic markers in biological fluids and has launched numerous products into commercial markets.

The opening will be followed at 11.15 am by the first Festival lecture, to be given by Professor John Parnell of Aberdeen University. Professor Parnell will describe the early results coming in from the journey into space this autumn of a piece of rock from Orkney.

The rock was attached to the outside of a Russian spacecraft taking off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and circled the earth for a number of days. The aim of the experiment was to see how the fossil organic material in the rock coped with the heat of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The results may give a clue as to whether it is possible that life could have originally been carried to Earth by meteorites – possibly from Mars.

Highland Science Festival joint director Maarten de Vries says that he is delighted by the arrangements for the opening of the new Festival. “A LifeScan opener and the UHI venue makes the perfect combination.

“The development of LifeScan has brought a large amount of cutting-edge research to the Highlands. It’s generating a climate of innovation in its own right. And UHI is the flagship for the new knowledge economy that is key to the future.

“In developing the concept of the Festival, we’ve had great support from LifeScan and UHI. The Festival took shape because of the initiative of Highland 2007 to have science as a key feature of the programme of events celebrating Scotland’s year of Highland culture. That was a really significant step and we are now working to put the vision into practice, and much appreciate the extent of help and enthusiasm we are receiving.”

The full Highland Science Festival programme can be found on the Festival website www.highlandsciencefestival.com

ENDS

For more information, contact Maarten de Vries, 01463 811927