The placement
Between them, Gianluca and Rafael hosted twelve A-level students (first and second year) from several different schools across two sessions each. Rafael welcomed six students in total — two in one session, and group four in another — while Gianluca hosted six students across a morning and afternoon session. Each placement ran for around an hour.
Why host students at all?
For Rafael, the motivation traces back to his own formative experiences running educational summer camps as a teenager, and later teaching undergraduates in Venezuela. “It marked my life,” he says of those early camps, and he sees work experience as a rare chance to give school students an honest, close-up look at a field before they commit to studying it at university.
Gianluca welcomed the chance to step back from the intensity of day-to-day analysis and translate complex work into something simple and relatable. He also enjoyed meeting students who already had a clear pull towards science subjects — medicine, neuroscience and chemistry among them — and helping them think through what a research career might actually involve.
What the session looked like
Rafael's approach centred on his own working week. After breaking the ice with a tour of the building and a coffee, he walked students through his diary meeting by meeting — grant discussions, a systematic literature review, collaboration calls — using each entry as a springboard to explain concepts like research funding, evidence synthesis, and why clinical trials don't always tell the whole story about “real world” patients.
Gianluca took a more hands-on, show-and-tell approach: introducing his own career path, opening R to demonstrate how routinely collected NHS data is analysed, and walking students through outputs such as an anonymised report from one exemplar study, prompting questions about differences across age, ethnicity and clinical clusters. He also spoke about data protection and the safeguards used to keep patient data secure.
Beyond the textbook
Both researchers used everyday analogies to bring an unfamiliar discipline to life. Rafael's favourite: asking students how they decide what to spend their own pocket money on, then drawing the parallel to how the NHS has to make similarly value-laden trade-offs with a finite budget.
Gianluca focused on the human judgement behind the data — helping students see that behind every statistic sits a decision about what questions to ask, and why.
What surprised them
Rafael was surprised by an unexpected question about the emotional reality of the academic job — one student asked whether the stress of chasing grant funding ever got to him. Gianluca was equally surprised by the students' maturity: one insisted he preferred to rely on his own thinking rather than AI tools for schoolwork, a stance Gianluca found both refreshing and thought-provoking, prompting a genuine conversation about how to use AI as a support rather than a crutch.
What they hope students took away
Both hope the sessions offered an honest picture of research careers. Rafael wants students to leave with a sense that decisions about NHS resources are grounded in evidence and trade-offs, and reassurance that studying one subject doesn't lock you into a single career path. Gianluca hoped to convey that most jobs — including this one — mix genuinely fascinating moments with mundane ones, and that it's fine to still be figuring things out; he admits he was still questioning his own choice of degree years into his studies.
Reflecting on research and public engagement
For Rafael, the sessions were a useful reminder that trade-offs in healthcare spending, while second nature to health economists, aren't obvious to everyone — and that the same conversations would resonate widely with the public, not just students weighing degree choices. Gianluca felt it reinforced the ultimate purpose of research: staying grounded in real-world impact rather than getting lost in technical detail.
Would they do it again?
Unreservedly, yes. Rafael's one suggestion for next time is to give students some background on their host's research area in advance, so they arrive with questions ready rather than needing time to process everything on the day. Gianluca would like to build in more opportunities for students to talk and ask questions themselves, having noticed some were too shy to speak up despite clearly being engaged.
With thanks to Gianluca Fabiano and Rafael Pinedo-Villanueva for their time and reflections.