Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI)

The Sound of Chemistry

Our summer public engagement activities are now getting into a lovely rhythm! Previous to the CCI project, the majority of our public engagement activities were based around science themed events, like the Cork Carnival of Science, Science Week and Dublin Maker. These events are fantastic and we always engage with huge numbers of people of all ages so we will continue them well into the future. However, we also wanted to see if we could do some some hands-on experiments at community type events. Previously, we’ve successfully employed our activities at the Ploughing Championships in 2022, the Ballina Salmon Festival in 2024 and the Boyle Arts Festival in 2024. So for 2025, we booked the CCI teams into two music and arts festivals, with plenty of success.

First, the Trinity team went down the to woods in Co. Wicklow to run our battery maker workshop at the Beyond the Pale Music and Arts festival. We met a range of people of all different ages and backgrounds who were fascinated to see some hands-on experiments at a music festival. Everyone loved the activity and had plenty of questions for our researchers. Then, the Sligo team ran a very busy tent at the Night and Day Music and Arts festival in Lough Key Forest park, Co. Roscommon. In both cases we were the only chemistry themed activity and the only Research Ireland funded project in attendance.

Together, we met 233 people across both music festivals, with the majority of the feedback received at the Night and Day Festival. Overall, the feedback we received through our smiley face stand was 93% positive, significantly more than other events we have done in the past. We were also delighted to meet and chat with Niamh Smyth TD, the Minister of State for Trade Promotion, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, as well as her daughter, at the Night and Day Festival. Well done to the entire CCI team for their hard work and professionalism as always, you are brilliant ambassadors and role models for chemistry. You have also proven beyond all doubt that high quality chemistry public engagement can be run anywhere!

Chemistry at the Carnival

Now that we’ve finished our school workshops for another academic year, we return to our public engagement programme for the summer. First on our list this summer was the Cork Carnival of Science in Fitzgerarlds park in Cork City on the 7th and 8th of June. This is one of our biggest annual events and this year was no different. We had PhD ambassadors from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), ATU Sligo, University College Cork (UCC) and Tyndall National Institute. Well done to Conor (TCD), Niamh (TCD), Tanya (ATU) and Keerthi (Tyndall) for being our experienced leaders this year. Thank you and well done also to Julie (TCD), Matt (TCD), Keith (ATU), Sreedhanya (ATU), Jack (UCC), Tara (UCC), Sam (UCC), and Deismita (Tyndall) for giving up their weekend to be one of our ambassadors and role models.

Huge thanks for Mervyn as always for having us at his amazing carnival and for helping us organise our very busy stand! Thank you also to Lynette (Tyndall) for dropping into the stand and helping the team, as well as our UCC colleagues for their assistance. We gathered feedback from 850 people over the two days, which means we probably engaged with over 1000 people this time. This was the most feedback we have ever gathered at the Cork Carnival of Science and it was also the most positive, with 97% of respondents choosing one of the two green smiley faces. We received very few negative responses and only a handful of neutral responses this year, so well done everyone!

Schools Out!

The 2024/2025 academic year has now concluded for CCI school workshops, and it was the busiest year yet. For the first time since CCI started in 2022, our team of enthusiastic PhD researchers engaged with over a thousand students in a single academic year. They visited Transition Year and Leaving Cert students in 40 schools across 16 counties since September. This year, over 80% of all students rated the CCI workshop as good or excellent, in line with previous years Also, 60% of the Leaving Cert (5th and 6th year) students we visited felt that the workshop encouraged them to pursue a STEM career, with most of the rest remaining undecided. The next academic year (2025/26) will be the final one for the CCI programme, with the project team now turning their attention to support the new Leaving Cert science specifications. A new research paper is also in preparation, showcasing the rich longitudinal data collected by CCI from 2,656 students in 120 schools to date – a quarter of which are designated DEIS. It’s hard to believe how far we have come since the end of the COVID pandemic, but there’s no doubt that CCI has been a huge success with long term impact.

The booking for for new workshops is now closed, we will prioritize schools who have never received a workshop for the 2025/2026 academic year, followed by those who haven’t received a workshop since the beginning of the project. Thank you to Loreto Mullingar, Rochfordbridge Community School, Carrigaline Community School and Loreto Balbriggan, all of which we visited over the past few weeks.

Engineers Day and ESB Science Blast

The CCI stand at the ESB Science Blast 2025

Our first public engagement events for 2025 took place at the start of March, with teams of researchers from Cork, Sligo and Dublin all chipping in. The Cork based CCI team from UCC Chemistry and Tyndall demonstrated how to make a battery for the Lifetime Lab Engineers Open day on Sunday the 2nd of March. The very next day, the Dublin based team kickstarted the CCI stand for the annual ESB Science Blast which is run over 4 days in the RDS Simmonscourt in Dublin.

As always for our Public Engagement activities, these events provide a unique opportunity for our researchers to meet in a non-formal environment to network, share experiences and work together as a team. This is especially true for the ESB Science Blast where the researchers from Trinity setup and ran the first two days, followed by the UCC and Sligo researchers who shared the responsibilities for Day 3 and 4. They also get to develop leadership skills, communication skills and teaching skills. Thank you to Bláithín and Niamh from Trinity for leading the stand, as well as Irthasa and Nishanth for leading the Sligo team and helping Niamh on Day 4. Thank you also to Niamh, Rebecca and Forest for communicating with students through the medium of the Irish language.

This year we also tested our newly developed Trinity Feedback survey tool, which worked perfectly over the 4 days. The overall Customer Satisfaction Score (CAST) for the CCI stand at the ESB Science Blast 2025 is 89%, same as last year i.e. most companies are happy with over 75%, anything over 85% is considered “exceptional”. However, we recieved feedback from 1293 students this year (2025), compared to 931 last year (2024) and 672 in 2023. So the CCI stand was a lot busier this year, almost twice as busy as 2023. Well done to all of our postgrad ambassadors who gave up their time and pulled themselves away from their research to engage with so many aspiring young scientists.

Photo credit (Lifetime Lab Open Day) – Keerthi Nair (Tyndall National Institute)

School Workshops are back for 2025!

Our teams of researchers from Cork, Dublin and Sligo are back on the road visiting schools all over Ireland for 2025. The workshops are ideal for TY and Leaving Cert students with a variety of skills developed over the course of the visit. We also provide a Q&A at the end of every session where the researchers also chat about their experiences with university life and what they are conducting their research on.

We are doing our best to get back to everyone, so you might be hearing from us soon! Demand is very high and there are a lot of logistics involved!

Photo Credit (CEIA Event Tyndall) – Keerthi Nair

Secondary School – Tanya Mehra (ATU Sligo)

CCI Symposium 2025

We kicked off a new calendar year with our project symposium, inviting all project partners to Trinity College Dublin to discuss the data we have collected so far, test out some new TY activities, take part in some training and network with colleagues.

We had a number of presenters over the two days which included:

John O’Donoghue talking about the longitudinal school workshop feedback data,
Natalia Garcia Domenech talking about our recently published public engagement paper,
Mervyn Horgan, who ran our training session for our CCI ambassadors, which included getting all of our ducks in a row!
Bláithín Rawson talking about her experience with external public engagement organizations and comparing it to her experience as a CCI ambassador.
Keerthi Nair talking about her experience as a CCI ambassador in both ATU Sligo and now Tyndall.

Thank you to the Cork and Sligo teams for traveling up to us and we look forward to meeting everyone again at the various public engagement events that we have planned over the summer.

Science Week Fun

This year we had a very busy science week schedule. In addition to our usual secondary school workshops running all over the country, we also ran activities at various public events. Our great Sligo team kicked off the fun at the Sligo Science Festival on the Sunday, quickly followed by the Dublin team at the STEAM Carnival in partnership with the Amber Research Centre. Both events were really busy, with our ambassadors engaging with hundreds of people.

On the Thursday of Science Week we hosted an online careers talk type event called Stories from the Lab. It showcased the research done by our amazing ambassadors in a short and interactive format that was accessible from anywhere. All secondary schools were invited to take part, with 12 joining us from all over Ireland. Some schools had a large crowd, meaning we had about 500 students tuned in at the same time. Thank you to all the teachers to facilitating the questions, we had so many that the event went over time. Well done to the speakers who pitched their talks at exactly the right level for the students and expertly managed all of the questions.

Finally, our Cork teams finished off the week with a fantastic community event with the Irish Girl Guides in Lifetime Lab. The ambassadors talked about making batteries and their research at the busy day. Well done everyone for our busiest ever science week and thank you to all the ambassadors in particular. for giving up their time.

Girl Guides

As well as running Secondary School workshops and micro-workshops at public engagement events, we also run workshops with community groups. Well done to our team from Tyndall National Institute who ran a very well received workshop with the Girl Guides in Cork. The workshop was led by Veda Sandeep with help from Dimitra Psychogiou, Shree Krishnamoorthy and Sahill Anchal who are post-docs/researchers contributing their time voluntarily.

Veda followed up the workshop with: “Yes, the experience was great and after the event all the Guides leaders gave me wonderful feedback. Julie Donnely is President of Girls Guides in Ireland, and she was there yesterday. After the event even Julie was happy and gave positive feedback. You can share with all who contributed to creating this activity and also thank them on our behalf. This is indeed a great service to the society”.

Below are some photos taken from the evening, credit to Veda.

We’re back on the road!

With the start of the new school year, our teams in Dublin, Sligo and Cork have hit the ground running with our Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI) school workshops. We have emailed all the teachers who have been in touch and we are now slowly arranging dates for this academic year. More details about our schools workshops can be found here

If you haven’t heard us yet, please get in touch through the website and we’ll find a date to fit your school in. We are busy with bookings, but we are sure that we will get to everyone by the end of the academic year. See you soon! The photos below are from Griffeen Community College in Lucan, Co. Dublin and Swords Community College, also Co. Dublin. Well done to our schools coordinator Natalia and TCD postgrad’s Niamh O’Shea and Bláithín Rawson for running the workshop

Researchers Night

For the first time our researchers at Trinity College Dublin took the lead to run a very busy stand at the European Researchers Night festival on campus in September. The European Researchers’ Night is the largest science outreach event in Europe. In 2024 and 2025, 58 projects ran across 25 countries.

Universities and research institutes across Europe opened their doors and shared their work through presentations, experiments, games, discussions and other interactive formats. We welcomed everyone behind the scenes, to meet researchers and discover how the seemingly abstract world of science is already affecting everyone’s life.

The European Researchers’ Night shows how researchers’ work affects our daily lives and brings research and researchers closer to the public, attracting over 1.5 million visitors across Europe and beyond each year. It promotes excellent research projects across Europe and beyond and aims to increase the interest of young people in science and research careers.

The researchers setup and ran the entire stand themselves, led by Bláitín and Lucy. The feedback they received was entirely positive with no negative responses. Well done to Bláitín, Lucy, Karlijn, Joshua, Sophie and Niamh who sat with over 100 people to talk about batteries, green energy and their own research. Photos credit to Bláithín Rawson.