Meet Trinity’s top researchers in a week of festivals

Posted on: 16 September 2024

The last week of September this year will see Trinity College Dublin’s campus open its gates to the public for an up-close look at the fascinating research that is shaping our world, and the brilliant researchers who are tackling some of our world’s most pressing issues – as well as some you may not expect.

Meet Trinity’s top researchers in a week of festivals

Heavy metal fans are invited on campus on September 27 to an evening at the Trinity Long Room Hub, where we'll explore heavy metal music's influence in a range of personal and professional contexts as part of the week-long Trinity Arts and Humanities Research Festival (23-27 September).

From Black Sabbath to Napalm Death, Poison to Pestilence, come and sample the tunes and themes that make metal in all its forms, from thrash to doom and beyond.

This event promises to be one of the many highlights of a week that will showcase the exciting work of researchers from Trinity’s faculties of STEM, health sciences and from the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile tents will be pitched on Front Square on Wednesday 25September for the inaugural Child Health Research Festival, where the public can explore how Trinity’s researchers are improving the quality of life for children and their families at home and abroad, through family-friendly interactive demonstrations, hands-on activities, games, fun installations, and exciting visual displays.

And finally, from the juggernaut of modern-day AI to the bacteria making their homes in our mouths, and from the power of music to the pursuit for truly green energy, the rich and varied world of academic research will be celebrated at the START Festival at Trinity College Dublin on Friday 27 September.

START (Start Talking About Research Today) Festival is part of European Researchers’ Night, a Europe-wide public engagement programme funded by the European Union, which displays the diversity of research and its impact on citizens’ daily lives in fun, inspiring ways. This year will again see events taking place across nearly 30 countries around Europe.

In Ireland the START Festival is hosted by Trinity in partnership with Royal College of Surgeons Ireland and ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI Driven Digital Content Technology.

Professor Sinéad Ryan, Dean of Research at Trinity, said:

“For over a decade we have been celebrating European Researchers’ Night in Trinity by opening eyes and minds to the wonderful world of research. The START festival offers a unique opportunity for our researchers to engage directly with people about what they do – and why they do it. Rather than simply disseminating their work, researchers from a huge variety of disciplines will chat openly and answer myriad questions, while running fun and interactive demos that help to bring everything to life. We very much look forward to welcoming everyone to another fantastic week of events, which culminate on Friday 27 September.”

Some of the highlights of START include:

Say hello to your microbiome! Have you ever wondered what lives inside you? Your microbiome is a collection of billions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that have made a home inside your body. Your mouth and intestines are two of the richest ecosystems in the body. Using our microscopes, we will give you the opportunity to take a look at some of the bacteria from your own mouth. Don’t be squeamish, we all have them!

Virtual Body, Real Impact! What happens to your body when you trick your mind into thinking you’re moving while sitting still and wearing a VR visor? From virtual to reality… and back! invites you to immerse yourself in a virtual world and experience it for yourself! Experience what it feels like to embody a virtual avatar by wearing an IVR visor. This avatar may have different somatic features (skin colour, clothes, body shape) or it can perform different actions (moving while the person is sitting) and this illusion can trigger subjective (having the feeling of moving) or physiological (changes in heart rate) effects.

Engineering Our Health. Meet some of our biomedical engineers to find out more about their research and how they are constructing artificial devices to help people with broken hearts, orthopaedic, spinal cord and eye issues. Get up close with some of their next-gen devices, see a bioengineering 3D printer in action, and play some eye-opening games!

Meetings with Manuscripts. In this ever-popular offering, you will meet researchers from the Trinity Centre for the Book and Trinity's Library, who will host a range of activities and challenges for all ages. See if you can beat the computer transcription challenge, try your hand at a manuscript matching game, or colour some recently digitised images!

In addition to the many offerings on Friday afternoon and evening, there are other highlights throughout the week, including:

The week-long Trinity Arts and Humanities Research Festival, which will showcase some incredible relics from our deepest vaults, such as an anti-plague recipe from the 1400s, and pose myriad fascinating questions such as: Why should lawyers read Star Wars? What aresome of the truly terrible bad environmental ideas from yesteryear? And why did The Beatles change us forever? The full programme is at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/events/trinity-arts-and-humanities-research-festival/#d.en.1864445

Wednesday’s Child Health Research Festival, which shines a light on some of the transformative work being led by Trinity researchers in areas varying from protecting babies brains to using LEGO to listen better to what children are telling us, and from the power of parents in helping babies to learn language to the gene therapies that could one day cure deadly diseases. The full programme is at: https://www.start-ern.org/child-health-festival