Navigating Uncertainty - Participant Engagement Website

Student - Cherie (Ruyi) Cheng

Supervisor - Tom Arichi

How do you communicate cutting-edge brain science to a parent who has just been asked to consent their newborn to an MRI scan? This project addresses a critical gap at the intersection of medical research communication and public engagement: participant-facing materials produced by clinical neuroscience groups rarely reflect contemporary science communication theory, leaving anxious families without the emotional and informational scaffolding required for genuinely informed decision-making. 

Embedded within the Perinatal Functional Imaging Group (PFIG) at King's College London and St Thomas' Hospital, I redesigned the group's participant engagement website, applying the dialogue model of science communication (Wynne, 1992) over the traditional deficit model. The site translates PFIG's research — including the UK's first 7 Tesla neonatal scanning programme and internationally recognised simultaneous EEG-fMRI findings — into a parent-facing emotional journey structured around five stages: from fear, through curiosity, to trust, agency, and outcome. 

Key design decisions include progressive information disclosure, a living comment system anchoring public questions to specific research claims, a five-step parent journey visualisation, real team photographs with first-person research narratives, and an original embedded video. Evaluated against Volk's (2024) outputs–outcomes–impacts framework, the site treats audience engagement as a measurable outcome rather than an incidental output of science communication practice.