PhD studentship to investigate the impact of outreach activities on the aspirations and career choices of school pupils

The aim of this PhD is to evaluate the impact of outreach activities on school children. We have been running targeted outreach activities through our award-winning ChemBAM project for the past few years. This has included working with disadvantaged primary and secondary schools, activities on campus and also our ChemBAM VI project, which aims to make chemistry accessible to people with vision impairment (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00396). Our initial feedback shows that pupils enjoy and value our activities and that they are encouraged to consider studying chemistry to a higher level.

This PhD project will evaluate this through a series of rigorous projects. The student will work with the ChemBAM team to design and deliver outreach activities and evaluate their impact on school pupils over a 3-year timescale. We will focus on GCSE (triple science), A-level and degree choices at secondary schools and on pupil aspirations for primary school pupils.

The applicant should have a good undergraduate chemistry degree. Other degrees will be considered if the applicant can demonstrate an ability to communicate chemistry concepts.