Trigger warning: Reference to death

'What Remains' is a community-led, participatory science project that brings together residents from the diverse communities surrounding Guy's Campus, London Bridge, to explore the biomedical science of death alongside their own cultural practices, rituals, and stories. Through a series of Death Café-style gatherings, participants will engage with science topics including decomposition, organ donation, forensic pathology, and the history of embalming, not as passive recipients of knowledge, but as co-producers of it. Every session will generate oral history material, personal testimonies, and community-authored science writing, which will be brought together into a professionally designed, community-produced zine.

Alyssa will present her zine live at the British Science Festival in Southampton before travelling to the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2027 and subsequently returning to the community spaces where it was made. The Gordon Museum of Pathology at King's College London is a proposed project partner, contributing scientific expertise, educational resource development, and institutional framing for the biomedical content explored across sessions.

Death is one of the most universal human experiences. Yet the science of death remains inaccessible to most people, locked behind institutional barriers, professional gatekeeping, and cultural taboo. What Remains does not bring science to communities. It builds something with them.

Alyssa's first experience of communicating science was through her degree in Biomedical Sciences at King's College London. In collaboration with the Gordon Museum of Pathology, she developed a timeline-based card game called Giving Life After Death, designed to open conversation around death, reduce its stigma, and make pathological knowledge accessible to audiences who are ordinarily excluded from it. Since graduating, Alyssa has been freelancing across STEAM outreach programmes at the Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, King's College London, under the mentorship of Dr Leigh Wilson, while working part-time as an anatomy demonstrator. Committed to science communication as a career, Alyssa will be embarking on an MSc in Science Communication at UCL later this year.

Alyssa told us that "winning the Josh Award would give me the resources, network, and credibility to turn that intention into something real: a project that meets communities where they are, that takes their knowledge seriously, and that builds something lasting. The professional development opportunities, particularly the Science Museum Group Academy training and the BIG network, would give me the scaffolding I need at exactly the right moment in my career".

Chair of the Josh Award Committee, Tim Phillips, said "Alyssa's project was chosen for its subject matter and approach, which we thought covered our 2026 Selection Criteria particularly well. The sciences behind the presently, culturally, felt-to-be-difficult topic of Death, are well worth exploring, engaging with, in the positive, accessible way Alyssa envisages delivering."

'What Remains' is a deeply personal project, and yet will resonate with all who have experienced loss and grief. We wish Alyssa all the best with her project, and are looking forward to seeing what results.

The Josh Award re-opens for applications in early 2028.