Importance of scientific outreach

When Julia and I started the blog in March 2021 we aimed to document and share our experience of starting a PhD during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. We firstly talked about how we were still trying to be productive while being stuck in our separate countries (such as in this post) and it has developed over time as our journeys have progressed. As such, it has become more focused on our research, which we both agreed is a good direction for the blog.

We think this due to the fact that scientific outreach is an underappreciated yet extremely important part of research. It can show what happens in the field of science and may encourage more people to enter the world of physics and astrochemistry. InterCat has been making an effort to communicate the research we do to the public and has been doing this in several ways. We have obviously started a blog that you are reading now and you may have seen my previous blog post about the videos I made while stuck in the UK. 

When the group at Leiden and here in Aarhus met for our retreat we all decided to make some outreach videos covering a variety of different topics. I thought this blog would be a good opportunity to show you some of these videos and that it would be the best way to give you a much broader insight into the different types of research we do. I hope you enjoy them and there will be more coming over time!

Alfred Hopkinson

A PhD student at InterCat studying the formation of organic molecules on carbonaceous grains.

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