27 November 2008

UQ undergraduate student Tim Mew will be spending the next two months facing angry bees in flight every day.

Tim, who is in the first year of a combined engineering/science degree at UQ, will study bees on a summer research scholarship supervised by Queensland Brain Institute Head of Visual Neuroscience, Professor Mandyam Srinivasan.

“I’ll be analysing the flight data from a hive of bees, which Srini’s lab has established,” Tim said.

He will be collecting and processing data from high-speed video footage of angry bees in flight.

His summertime data crunch is the perfect end-of-year assignment for someone who has long held an interest in radio controlled model aircraft.

After winning the Australian Brain Bee Challenge in 2006, Tim went on to compete in the international leg of the neuroscience competition for high school students, an event in which he achieved fifth place.

Tim is also a champion commuter. His weekday journey from Bald Hills to the University's St Lucia campus takes anything up to 90 minutes, but that doesn't seem to have reduced his buzz one bit.

Media: QBI Communications, telephone (07) 3346 6414.