Engagement in University Research for Children and Adolescents (EUReCA)

The EUReCA programme started in 2022 as a strategic project of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN) with the aim of offering practical experience and meaningful engagement to research conducted in University labs and departments for school-age young people. The EUReCA team work with young people, their parents, and their schools to understand the challenges in engaging with University research, and the motivations of young people to overcome them. We are particularly interested in understanding how to lower the barriers to engagement, including to empower young people from under-represented backgrounds to imagine themselves as contributors to research, in the academy and beyond.

To find out more about EUReCA and how to get involved, please contact the team.

I was awarded a British Science Association media fellowship in 2015. Supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), I abandoned the lab to work as a science journalist at Nature News. I wrote a series of news stories for print and online. I learned about the challenges and opportunities of good science reporting, and returned to my lab a better writer and communicator.

I was invited to take part in the Web We Want festival at the Southbank Centre in London, in May 2015. The festival marked 25 years of the World Wide Web, and explored its past and its possible future. I took part in a session that explored whether the internet may be changing the architecture of our brains; the panel was curated by AXNS Collective, a curatorial collective at the intersect between science and art.

Our work with business leaders on decision-making under uncertainty in social contexts was featured by the BBC in 2010.