Two hundred young researchers will shortly go into schools to enthuse youngsters about subjects ranging from engineering and law to history and earth sciences.
This new phase of the Researchers in Residence scheme will be announced next week at the British Association's Festival of Science in Norwich by Edinburgh University, along with Birmingham, Cardiff, Manchester, Sussex and York universities, Imperial College London, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich.
Edinburgh has won the £1.2 million contract to run the three-year scheme, funded by Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust. The university is already running a successful "Science Communication in Action" programme, training PhD students to go into schools and explain their work. Mary Bownes, Edinburgh's vice-principal, said the Researchers in Residence scheme gave researchers exciting opportunities to help young people explore why research was important to contemporary life.
Researchers would be trained locally and regional officers would match them with schools. Professor Bownes said the expansion of the scheme to involve all the research councils meant researchers from different disciplines could work together.
"We want them not just to help with research projects, but also with ethical discussions, workshops and careers," Professor Bownes said. "We would encourage researchers to go back to their old schools because they make perfect role models. We would like them to develop a lifetime habit of discussing their research."
Cathy Vickers, a postdoctoral research fellow in neuroscience at Edinburgh, fascinated local pupils by showing them how to extract DNA from a strawberry. It's very easy, just a simple chemical reaction with detergent and some alcohol," she said. "We had training in how to talk to schoolchildren in language they would understand, how to keep their attention, let them all have a go at an experiment and make it fun."
Dr Vickers said communication skills were becoming more important, with research councils stipulating that researchers had to do outreach work. "It was a lot more rewarding than I expected," she said. "Had I gone in without the training, I might have made it a bit too 'science-y', with too much jargon. But the children were really enthusiastic. I wanted to encourage them not to be turned off science, thinking it's boring."