Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI)
Sparking conversations with schools and community groups about energy storage
For the third year in a row, the CCI team setup shop at the Dublin Maker festival for some public engagement. We returned to Richmond Barracks again where we met over 1,000 people over the two days. Well done to everyone from Trinity College Dublin and the Atlantic Technological University Sligo for their professionalism and enthusiasm throughout. Below are some photos that we took, but we are also delighted to see lots of photos of CCI on the Dublin Maker website as well.
After two years of enormous success at science events like the Cork Carnival of Science, Dublin Maker and Science Week, this summer we also delivered our popular public engagement activities at some community events in the North West of Ireland for the first time.
At the end of June we hosted our micro workshops at the Teddy Bears Picnic, which formed part of the Ballina Salmon Festival. We had a lot of fun with the participants and teddy bears, and the feedback received was hugely positive. Then we made our way to the popular Boyle Arts Festival at the end of July, where we engaged with families and all ages at the farmers market. Again, the feedback was hugely positive. Both of these events helped us breakdown barriers and prove that chemistry is accessible to all in every environment.
Well done to the ATU Sligo team for organizing both events and for sparking conversations with all ages, our PhD ambassadors were enthusiastic and engaging as always.
For the third year in a row, we returned to the ever popular Cork Carnival of Science, held in Fitzgerald’s Park in Cork city. As always, there was a huge attendance over the two days, passing over 10,000 people. Thanks to Mervyn for having us there, it is great to have Lifetime Lab on our project this year to offer advice and to help with the public engagement side of our project. Our team “sparked conversations” with about 3000 people at the Cork Carnival of Science this year.
Once again the PhD ambassadors are key to the success of our Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI) project. As well as helping everyone learn more about green energy, they also act as tangible role models for budding young scientists. Thank you to all of our PhD ambassadors for their enthusiasm, professionalism and generosity with their time. It was also great to have ambassadors from Tyndall and UCC join us this year also for the first time alongside those from TCD and ATU Sligo. They are all inspiring Role Models – we had many children return to us for more chats!
Thank you to Science Foundation Ireland for their support as always, without which we could not undertake any of our activities. The feedback we gathered from participants was the largest ever, and was overwhelmingly positive. We look forward to publishing the results for everyone to see very soon.
#ChemEd #chemistry #researchimpact #phdlife #ireland. #ChemEd #chemistry #researchimpact #phdlife #ireland
Our ATU Sligo team have been very busy as we approach the end of the academic year with visits to St. Mary’s Ballisadare, Ballinrobe Community School, Letterkenny Community School, and St. Murdach’s in Ballina. Some of the workshops took place on campus, while others took place in schools. We continue to work closely with schools to provide exactly what they want to make CCI as accessible as possible for all students. The feedback that we have received from the students and teachers has been hugely positive.
A huge thank you to all the researchers at the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) in Sligo for giving up their time and making the effort to inspire so many young chemists, these including Tanya Mehra, Shaista Jabeen, Irthasa Aazem VS, Keerthi M. Nair and Sreedhanya Pallilavalappil. Special thanks also to Nishanth Thomas who organized and led the workshops.
Our pubic engagement activities are back for 2024 with two events in March. First up we had the Lifetime Lab Engineers Open Day on Sunday, 3rd March. This was led by Bláithín from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) who trained and coordinated a team of three researchers from UCC and Tyndall.
Then we went straight into one of our largest public events of the year with the ESB Science Blast in the RDS in Dublin from the 4th to the 7th of March. Day one and two were led by Bláithín and Susie from TCD, while day three and four were led by Nishanth and Keerthi from ATU Sligo. We had a mixture of researchers from TCD, ATU Sligo and UCC over the course of the four days.
Also, day four is a special Irish language day! A few of our researchers engaged through Irish, while we also had our new Irish poster on display and available for teachers to take away with them. We met over 1000 people in 5 days across both events! Well done to all of our researchers who gave up so much of their time and travelled across the country in many cases!
We are delighted that our popular CCI project will continue until the end of 2025 thanks to generous support by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) from the Discover Programme. In addition to our existing partners in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Atlantic Technological University Sligo, we are also expanding to more partners, in Munster with the University College Cork (UCC) School of Chemistry, Tyndall National Institute and Lifetime Lab, Cork. This will allow us to visit even more schools, especially in the south of the country.
We kicked off the new expanded project with a training session in the Eureka Lab in UCC in January, and since then our partners in Tyndall have already run two workshops with Transition Year students from schools all over Cork in February (photos below). We are delighted to have new researchers join our team and we look forward to an exciting 2 years with all of our partners.
Huge thanks again to SFI for their support, the press release from TCD for the 2024 Discovery Grants can be found here
We kicked off another academic year in Ireland with lots of new schools in the North West and around Dublin.
The postgrad team in ATU Sligo undertook the long journey up to Letterkenny to meet the students in Loreto, as well as a trip over to Mayo to meet everyone at Gortnor Abbey. The team in Trinity on the other hand have undertook lots of shorter journeys to schools who didn’t get a workshop last year due to high demand. They visited CBS Westland Row, Drimnagh Castle, St. Kevins College, St. Benildus College, Pobalscoil Neasain and a few more.
We have nearly caught up with the backlog so we can now get back in touch with our new applications for the new academic year
We have kicked off another academic year of school workshops, but this time in Belgium! The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Belgium Local Section kindly invited us over to run workshops with two international schools. You can read their blog post about the trip here:
https://rscbelgium.blogspot.com/2023/10/current-chemistry-investigates-movies.html
The funding for the trip was provided by the RSC Belgium local section, with John, Natalia and Fiona giving up their time to run the workshops at a very busy time of year. We ran two workshops with A-level and International Baccalaureate (IB) students in the British School of Brussels on the first day, and John also presented his “Chemistry in the Movies” talk at the annual prize giving ceremony. We then ran another two workshops with IB students at St. Johns International School in Waterloo on the second day of the trip.
Thanks again to the RSC Belgium Local section for having us, we learned so much about international schools and we also got lots of positive feedback from students and teachers.
Our CCI workshops are run by PhD researchers (Ambassadors) from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Sligo. To ensure that our workshops continue to meet the highest quality in terms of informal education, we provide training for our PhD researchers in the form of Science Communication, informal education, public engagement and resource development.
ATU Sligo kicked off the training for the new academic year with a training workshop for new PhD starters at the University, with experienced PhD ambassadors providing their insights from the previous academic year. In TCD, the annual Education and Public Engagement (EPE) module has also started with 10 new PhDs signed up to take part in the training programme with runs throughout the year. The TCD programme also includes lectures and a team project to develop new ideas and resources for schools and the public.
The benefits for PhD researchers of doing informal education and public engagement activities like Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI) are numerous. The CCI programme helps our PhD ambassadors develop their public speaking, science communication, teaching and teamwork skills among many others. It also creates a sense of community among researchers to share ideas and develop peer support.
Best of luck to all the new PhD ambassadors, we are delighted to have you on the programme!
At the end of August we were delighted to gather everything together for our first ever “CCI Symposium” or “Town Hall” meeting. We had project coordinators, facilitators and PhD ambassadors all together for the day in Trinity College Dublin. We also had some new partners with us from UCC Chemistry, Tyndall and Lifetime Lab. We spent the day making improvements to our school workshops, adjusting questions and going through all the data we collected.
The first data from the project is now available in our first publication from the project in the Journal of Chemical Education. The paper is open access to ensure that all of our partners are able to see the data they helped us collect: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c00515
Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI)