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.

Do You Want to Make a Battery?

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.

Photos 2024

Community Spirit

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.

Cork Carnival of Science 2024

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

Meeting Schools in the North-West

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.

Public Engagement is Back

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!

New Partners!

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