Sean Behan and Jack McIraith, 6th year Chemistry students from the Marian College with Dr Graeme Jones at his RSC sponsored Saturday Night Science show, which was held as part of UCD Science’s celebration of Science week.
To celebrate National Science Week (8-15 November), UCD hosted a number of events to promote the relevance of science, engineering and technology in our everyday lives and to demonstrate the importance of these disciplines to the future development of Irish society and to the economy.
UCD Research exhibited a collection of images on the theme of 'Environment' in UCD Health Sciences Centre. The chosen images were from a selection, submitted to the UCD Research Images Competition, of the most innovative and imaginative research images created by researchers in UCD during the course of their research.
UCD Science ran events attended by over 550 secondary school students from 50 schools in Dublin, Wicklow, Wexford, Monaghan and Sligo.
The programme kicked off with a Science Career night was held for 5th and 6th year students. “The aim of this event was to demonstrate the diversity of science careers open to UCD Science graduates from teaching to becoming an entrepreneur,” explained Prof Mark Rogers, Dean of Science who chaired the event.
The “Day in a Life of” talks kicked off with Physics graduate Dr Stephen Gammell, who is currently teaching physics but explained how he has also worked during his summer holidays with Dr John Quinn from the UCD School of Physics analysing data from VERITAS, a new array of telescopes located in Arizona. Microbiology graduate Dr Clár Donnelly then told the audience about the work she’s involved in analysing samples from crime scenes at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Dublin.
Entrepreneur and Computer Science graduate Dr Maurice Coyle illustrated how it is possible to turn research into a business as he told the audience of the challenges working for a new company called HeyStaks. Ms Evelyn Cusack from Met Éireann and RTE gave an interesting insight into life as a meteorologist from a forecasting and broadcasting perspective. The talks ended with mathematician Mr Fergal Daly who outlined how his work with Google ensures that our Google searches always return results.
Later in the week Dr Graeme Jones from Keele University put on a chemistry show in a Royal Society of Chemistry sponsored event. Using the analogy of boy meets girl, Dr Jones gave his take on the nature of chemical reactions and the science of attraction. He described how glow worms attract each other using bioluminescence. “Science starts with observation,” he claimed, challenging the audience to look closely at a video of how naturally occurring pheromones are used by silk moths to attract each other and by us to protect plants from pests.
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