For the fifth year running, the Henry Royce Institute was at the New Scientist Live exhibition at the Excel Centre in London last weekend. Our enthusiastic staff and interactive stand encouraged event attendees to engage with materials science.
Organised by New Scientist magazine, New Scientist Live is attended by over 26,000 people over three days. The event is a particular opportunity for us to spark the imaginations of children and young people who will be the next generation of materials scientists.
Tom Hancocks, Training and Skills Manager for Royce explains:
“New Scientist Live is very much a highlight of the Royce year. It is the one event where we step away from the lab and into the wider world to engage with thousands of people who are genuinely curious about materials science.
“For this year’s event colleagues from Royce at Cambridge joined members of our Training and Engagement team to showcase our work to the public. We really enjoyed talking with attendees about how central materials innovation is to all of our lives and allowing them to get hands on with some of the research which is currently being carried out through Royce.
“Attendees got to learn how the work carried out in our labs leads to innovations which help to drive the shift to carbon neutral and improve products we all use in our day-to-day lives.
“Our hands-on experiments allowed people to learn about porosity and how novel coatings can produce materials which are corrosion resistant. We also shared some of the incredible images produced when we examine materials under our next generation microscopes to understand how they are formed and how they perform in different situations.
“The face-to-face engagement that we get at this event is invaluable. Our researchers get to answer the public’s real-world questions about materials science and spark curiosity in the minds of the many children who attend. It also gives us an opportunity to share advice with young people and their families who are interested in a career in materials science.”
Over the New Scientist Live weekend our team engaged with thousands of attendees. The materials science engagement continued on the Monday, when our partner Discover Materials took over our stand to interact with visiting school groups.
