Dr Sam Henry awarded MPLS Impact Award for Public Engagement with Research

Earlier this week, the Division announced the winners of its Impact Awards.

These awards aim to foster and raise awareness of impact by rewarding it at a local level, preparing the ground for the impact case studies that will be needed for REF 2021, and future similar exercises. Awards comprise a pay award of £1,000 (minus taxes) made to the individual.

Prizes are awarded in four categories: Commercial Impact, Social Impact, Early Career Impact and of course Public Engagement with Research Impact.

A significant number of nominations were received, and a cross-departmental judging panel was convened to consider the nominations. You can read more about the winners in the other categories here, but I wanted to share some more information about the work of Dr Sam Henry who won the PER category for his work to engage new online audiences with particle physics through the use of fan fiction, and engaging local audiences through science stalls. You can read a bit about Sam Henry's engagement work here, but also I wanted to share this video of Sam's excellent talk on his fan fiction work in last year's PER Conference, so you can get a flavour of how he managed to target a specific audience with appropriate and creative engagement, and the responses he's received from those public audiences. Enjoy!