Outside of my academic studies I run the non-profit outreach project ScienceNation. We aim to instil an enthusiasm for science in young people and inspire them to pursue STEM subjects at higher education. Since founding the project in 2013 I have been able to arrange several notable excursions:

• Whilst the LHC was shutdown for upgrade after run 1 we visited CERN and were able to go down and see the CMS detector.
  

  Figure 1: ScienceNation at the CMS detector. This was taken whilst George Percival (co-founder) and I visited CERN in 2014.

  
• Through EDF Energy I was able to arrange in interview with the director of Dungeness B Nuclear Power Station. We were invited to visit the power station during an outage and were given a tour of the entire facility.
• QinetiQ invited us to their human centrifuge facility where we were accelerated to 4.4g!
• We travelled to Reykjavik, Iceland, and later to Tromsø, Norway, to see the aurora borealis (2nd time lucky).
  

  Figure 2: The Great Geysir, Iceland, can be seen in the foreground, with George and I pictured behind it.

  

These were fantastic experiences and they were only possible because I took every opportunity to network with science and technology companies.

ScienceNation has afforded me plenty of public speaking and science communication opportunities. A goal of the project has always been to showcase exciting science experiments that students don’t get to see in their school classrooms. With funding attained from my university I have been able to perform live experiments at local schools and events. The most memorable of which are of course the experiments involving liquid nitrogen.