During my PhD I have been involved in several outreach projects. These have been aimed at a variety of audiences and with different motivations for each. Some attempted to broadly introduce exoplanetary science to members of the general public while others aimed to give a more in-depth summary of the subject to school students so that they gained an insight into the realities of science and academic research.
ORBYTS Fellow (February 2024 - June 2025)
I have delivered ORBYTS projects to two groups of school children in the second and third years of my PhD. ORBYTS aims to give students from backgrounds under-represented in research and academia a realistic insight into the world of research. Unlike other forms of outreach, ORBYTS students see the same researchers week after week, build their knowledge on a specific topic, and, eventually, they perform a real life research project.
As a second year PhD student I ran a project for a group of year 10 students. Over five months, I introduced the group to the field of exoplanets and provided them with the foundations in python to be able to model exoplanet atmospheres using TauREx3. The students then took a published spectrum, reproduced the data with a model and investigated molecules that were not found in the spectrum and tried to determine at what abundance they would be detectable if present.
In my third year I ran a project jointly with another UCL student. Our group consisted of students in years 11 and 12 from two schools. In this case, the students were tasked with studying degenerate solutions to reproduce exoplanet transmission spectra and they produced two research posters which were presented to a conference at UCL.