Why bother with outreach?

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Last February, I had the opportunity to plan and run an outreach activity as part of the 2025 Nottinghamshire Festival of Science and Curiosity. I was no stranger to this sort of event, having volunteered at many similar ones both back in Brazil while an undergrad and then a PhD student and in the UK as a University of Nottingham staff member. Running an activity directly related to my research, however, was something new.

The experience was great, and with the support I received from the Society for Experimental Biology and the local team at the Southwell Minster, I was able to speak to over 200 young people, all of whom got to take home a plant clone - a mint cutting they made and potted themselves - and hear about my research on tree clonal propagation.

While I stood there in the centuries-old minster, I could not help but think about why I feel so drawn to these events and why I try to get involved whenever I can. It all goes back to my own personal debt to outreach programmes everywhere - especially the one that reached out to me.

Why I do it

The year was 2011, and what was a morning like any other in my high school changed when someone knocked on the door and asked for five minutes to speak to us. Visiting the school were volunteers from the local university who were there to promote a new outreach project, funded by Petrobras (think BP or Exxon, but Brazilian). It turned out Petrobras were keen to invest in programmes that would promote careers in STEM to an audience of public school students.

Our local university had been selected to run such a programme, and the more I heard about it, the more I knew I wanted in. If selected, I would actually get to visit university labs and take part in workshops where I would learn about renewable sources of energy, deepen my understanding of STEM concepts by using them to solve problems... what was there not to love?

I did get selected and every Friday for six months I would spend my afternoon with university lecturers and other high school students, participating in activities that ranged from LEGO robotics to making rubber and biodiesel.

This outreach programme was the single watershed moment that led me to where and who I am today. It lifted the veil that obscures the academic microcosm from most people's daily lives, and I immediately fell in love with the idea of tackling life's big questions and helping people solve problems. For someone with my background, that veil was particularly thick: no-one in my family had gone to university or even set foot in a lab before; my high school did not have a functioning science lab where I could see or do anything remotely like what I experienced on those Fridays.

During all of my undergraduate degree and my PhD, I got involved in outreach programmes whenever I could; the reason why is quite simple and goes beyond ticking a box in the ever-growing list of "things people tell you you should have in your CV".

My journey here so far is a direct result of the power of reaching out to meet a young person's curiosity and potential. My choice to go into academia is, of course, an extreme example, but I know that many of those that were in the same programme I was in followed careers in engineering and other STEM fields. Shared amongst all of us alumni, I like to believe, is a unique respect for the use of scientific knowledge and critical thinking in problem-solving. I think we can all agree society can do with a bit more of that; if I can help this cause one outreach event at a time, then count me in.