Researchers
We want the Exeter Science Centre to be an invaluable resource for researchers, to help communicate your work to people of all ages and backgrounds, and boost public enthusiasm for STEAMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics and Medicine).
How we can help
We want to make research dissemination easy for you! You can take part in our public events or work with us on projects, we can help share your research updates on social media, and we will have dedicated exhibition spaces for STEAMM research in the eventual building. We’re also here to offer our advice and support on science communication – it’s our speciality!
In addition, we offer staff/student training in public engagement, and custom public engagement programmes for academics to help you to demonstrate the impact of your research!
Register your interest by filling in our short form:
Public Engagement Programmes
Maximise your impact!
Funding bodies and Universities recognise public engagement as a hugely important part of research – but time constraints often make it difficult to do this properly, or even at all. That’s where we can help! We can offer an impactful and measurable public engagement programme of your work, including:
- Designing and delivering interactive, public exhibitions.
- Designing and running research-inspired workshops in schools.
- Producing YouTube videos.
- Producing live lab or site tours to schools or the public (check out our ESC Live project resources to see what we can do).
- Creating WordPress websites, including public-level paper summaries.
- Creating a pack of hands-on demonstrations or exhibits related to your research, and showing these at public events and festivals.
- Designing and running citizen science projects.
- Designing infographics – useful for public engagement and including in presentations.
- Establishing social media profiles for your research group, that can be maintained by your research team in future.
- Organising and facilitating public talks, panel sessions and lab tours.
- Recording, editing and promoting podcasts.
Have a look at some of our work so far:
All activities and follow-up engagement are fully reported in a Research Excellence Framework (REF)-friendly format.
How do I take part?
You can fill out our short form, or contact us directly. We’ll arrange an initial meeting with you to establish how we can help, and then we’ll put together a programme and formal quote to fit your budget.
We can write proposals for you to include us in future grant applications, or we can help fulfil your public engagement requirements on existing grants. Perhaps you have co-creation funding as part of a fellowship and would like to work with us in a different manner; either way, we’d love to hear from you!
How much does it cost?
We’re trying to make our pricing reasonable and give you good value for money, and of course you’re contributing to a charitable cause. To give you an idea of what we could offer, here is a sample impactful programme:
Includes: preparation; meeting with you and being on-call for advice; development, organisation and promotion of the activities; collecting feedback from participants; recording and publishing videos / photos of activities where relevant and reporting back at the end of the programme to demonstrate impact.
| Activities carried out over 1 year, £5k |
|---|
| – Design & run a workshop in 4 secondary schools across the South West, including freely-available activity sheets. – Create a WordPress website to introduce the research & the team, including 3 short, public-level summaries of the latest research papers. – Produce and promote an educational and informative YouTube video about the research, 3-4 minutes long, for a public audience. |
In-person activities could be made fully online as required, and could showcase the work of one academic, or a range of research projects within a research group. If you have a smaller or larger budget, we can easily extend or reduce the scope to fit your requirements, and we’re very flexible on what we can offer.
In summary
We want to make it easy for you to demonstrate the impact of your research. This helps us to raise funds for and awareness of the Exeter Science Centre and meets our aims of better connecting the public with current STEAMM research and industry.
We have proven experience in public engagement with research, we take an interest in all areas of STEAMM, and we have a growing network of schools, community groups, businesses and organisations across the region and beyond, to help you reach a large audience. Please get in touch to work with us! If you don’t have funding available and would like to work with us on an ad hoc basis, we’d still love to hear from you.
Examples of our work
We’ve been working with academics at the University of Exeter to help engage the public with their work. To get an idea of what we can produce, we have some example outputs from these latest projects below:
Exhibitions
We worked with academics in the Exoclimatology group at the University of Exeter and local artists to design and run our first public exhibition (funded by an STFC Spark Award). This hands-on experience was guided by a team of mediators (local scientists and Exeter Science Centre volunteers) and connected over 1200 people with this research. Check out our exhibition virtual tour here to find out more.
In 2023, we reimagined the original exhibition to make an even more research-filled and accessible experience, find out more here!
YouTube videos
We can design, record, edit and promote educational and informative YouTube videos. Have a look at the Meet the Team video we produced for Prof Temperton’s citizen science project, the shorts video we produced for Drs Julie Pepper and Katherine Ashbullby, and check out our YouTube channel for all the videos we’ve created.
Website design
We completely designed and created the new website for the Wu Lab research team, including the production of detailed research summaries. The website is aimed towards the public with an interest in tech / AI / machine learning / 5G, and people working in research and industry. Check out the website here: https://wu-lab.exeter.ac.uk/.
We’re also working with academics at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University to connect the public with a new project on Image-Driven, Subject-Specific Spine Models (IDSSSM). Check out the website we designed here: https://idsssm.exeter.ac.uk/.
Project Landing Pages
For some projects, it may be more appropriate to produce a landing page with more information, rather than an entire website. We can produce and host educational and informative landing pages on our website, to provide more information and link to any resources (including YouTube videos) that we produce.
Have a look at the page we designed for Prof Ben Temperton’s citizen science project, or the resource page on Maths Anxiety for Drs Julie Pepper and Katherine Ashbullby.
Infographics
We’ve prepared the first infographic for the IDSSSM team, to describe the background and aims of the project.
As part of this design, we created the project logo and colour palette which is used throughout the website. Check out the full infographic here.
Research-inspired workshops
We have years of experience designing and running workshops in schools, to communicate research to young people. In our recent work with Prof. Francesca Palombo, we have designed and delivered workshops for GCSE / A-Level students based on the research team’s work: explaining the physics of Raman and Brillouin spectroscopy, and their applications in cancer research. The resources are freely available on our Schools webpage.
Interested? Register your interest or email us to book in a discussion.