Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI)
Sparking conversations with schools and community groups about energy storage
As we enter our 5th year of the CCI project, we are still visiting new schools in new parts of Ireland. 2025 finished off with some visits to schools in the North West, led by the ATU facilitators, and 2025 has now started with schools in Dublin and the North West. Well done to all of our facilitators for continuing to bring our hugely popular and successful workshops to new parts of Ireland.
Every year the entire CCI team meet up to share best practise, network and complete training and upskilling. We also use the oppertunity to share strories and ideas from our travels around Ireland. It is also a great oppertunity to provide Science Communication training and make changes to the content and evaluation components of the CCI workshop.
Al of our preivous meetings have taken place in Trinity College Dublin in order to facilitate everyone travelling from Sligo and Cork. For our 2026 meeting, we decided to travel to a neutral location in the centre of Ireland! Thanks to the TCD School of Physics who hosted us at the Science Education Centre at iLOFAR in Birr Co. Offaly. Well done to everyone for travelling and for sharing best practise, and for engaging with all of the content.
Also, huge thanks to Fergus McAuliffe from the Trinity Research Office for his training on Logix models and to Elspeth Sinclair from the ICRAG research centre for her really great talk about her EPE work. We also recieved a wonderful tour of the iLOFAR radio telescope and historic Leviathan of Parsonstown from Conor.
Over the summer of 2025 we had some staff changes for the project with Nishanth making the move from ATU Sligo to Trinity College Dublin to take over as our full-time project coordinator. Thankfully, after running CCI for 3 full academic years, the workshop and logistics are now a well oiled machine so Nishanth was able to get up to speed very quickly!
We are delighted that we have been able to contact all of the teachers who requested workshops and have arranged so many visits over the past few weeks. It has been the busiest start to an academic year since we started CCI! We have also run workshops in new counties, which include Limerick, Waterford and Clare for the first time. Well done to all of our PhD facilitators from ATU, UCC, Tyndall and Trinity.
For 2025, Dublin Maker moved venues, taking over the Leopardstown Racecourse in South Dublin! As a result, we finished our summer with the busiest ever Dublin Maker – with 1,234 responses on our HappyorNot smiley face stand, which is the largest we have collected at any event throughout the CCI project.
Well done to our facilitators from ATU Sligo and Trinity who worked side by side to expertly manage and engage with the enormous crowds! Well done to Bláithín who was our “Front of House” leader, as well as all the other faciliators who took on the lead role for the weekend. It was hugely diffitult to manage the large number of people who wanted to try out our activity. Also, special thanks to Conor who came to the rescue on the Sunday when we realised we needed more people to! Despite the enormous crowds, the team still managed to achieve a 91% CSAT score (customer satisfaction score) from the smiley face stand. Over 90% is considered exceptional.
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!
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!
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.
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)
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)
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:
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.
Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI)