National Network Meeting 2019

During the summer of 2019, we continued to advance science communication and educational outreach in Ireland with the second annual meeting of the Cell EXPLORERS network.

Delegates from across the country traveled to NUI Galway on Thursday 22nd of May to consolidate the recent expansion of the project from 10 to 13 partner teams run out of 15 higher education institutions in Ireland. The Cell EXPLORERS project now covers 11 counties including many of those that have been identified as having poor exposure to STEM public engagement.

At the Network meeting, team coordinators from existing teams had the opportunity to once again meet their counterparts from other teams and share their experiences from the past year. The meeting also allowed the network to meet the coordinators from the new teams based in Cork IT, GMIT, Limerick IT and Future Neuro and for the new coordinators to get a feel for what it means to be part of the network.

The delegates for the meeting had the opportunity to become young scientists for the afternoon when new and revised Cell EXPLORERS sessions including Little Cells and Fantastic DNA in the Lab were introduced to them. The day finished on an exciting note when guest speaker Ran Peleg of the University of Southampton ran his chemistry escape room with the delegates, this was a valuable experience as the Cell EXPLORERS Escape Room is currently being developed in collaboration with Ran, watch this space for more info on that soon!