"My dissertation aimed to investigate the processes and equipment used in the vaccine cold chain to determine where improvements can be made to reduce vaccine wastage. The largest sources of wastage occurred in the developing world in hot climates such as sub-Saharan Africa. 

The cause was temperature excursions above and below the recommended vaccine temperatures of 2-8 degrees C rendering them ineffective and could be attributed to storing them in improper cold chain material.  

For my research, I looked into methods that previously existed and their issues, I fixed on the single largest contributing issue and sought a way to improve it. I went through the engineering design process to produce a product that could theoretically fix the problem. In my case, it was a mechanical box that opened and closed at certain temperatures so that ice inside could cool the vaccine fridges down during a power cut. I devised a computational fluid dynamics simulation modelling it and ran tests alongside using some old fridges I bought from gumtree as validation for the system.

Completing the dissertation helped land me my current job, it was a huge talking point throughout the interview process."