Connecting Communities to Queen Mary: A Season of Engagement
This year, the Centre for Public Engagement (CPE) has been on a mission: to redesign community engagement at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). We want to support our staff and students to connect with communities and bring their research to life through interactive engagement at local events and large-scale festivals.
Between June and October, we did just that. We took the CPE on the road, hosted four major events across London and connected dozens of QMUL staff and students with over 3,000 people of all ages.
Here’s what we got up to…
Our summer of engagement started in June at one of the UK’s largest free family festivals, the Lambeth Country Show. Teams of researchers and student ambassadors from the Centre of the Cell and the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences joined us in the festival’s “Science Big Top”. Over the weekend, around 1,000 people dropped by to take part in their activities. Visitors designed and crafted cells, explored time and space relativity through biscuit decorating, and created sodium alginate ‘Jelly Worms’. After the event, one staff member reflected on the scale of the event, saying, “It was great to showcase our activities and connect with so many people in one event”.
In July, we had the opportunity to celebrate family and community just 10 minutes away from our Mile End campus at the Tower Hamlets Family Hubs South West Locality Summer Fun Day. A hugely fun day, it was unique in our calendar as it wasn’t focused just on science. Having seven stalls gave us the chance to showcase everything from pop-up sports activities to identity self-portraiture with the Legal Advice Centre. We also started evaluating work with a simple, child-friendly sticker system – we were happy to see 64% of people saying they loved the activities and 34% saying they liked them.
The fun continued into August when we partnered with the Blizard Institute’s Centre of the Cell to run our second annual Science Fun Day. With twice the visitors of last year, 120 people joined to visit the STEM Pod Experience, learn about careers in STEM, and take part in hands-on activities.
Our final event of the season was something totally new to us. Across three days in October, we hosted a stall at New Scientist Live, one of the UK’s largest public science festivals. As well as bringing four teams of QMUL staff and students to host stalls at the event, we also ran a community ticket scheme to share 150 free passes with local schools and community partners. Activities challenged visitors to grapple with policy making decisions around Universal Free School Meals, explore green spaces’ role in the health of wildlife and humans, learn about the structures of the brain, and even grow their own microbes.
What we’re taking forward into 2026
As the academic year continues, we continue to refine what community engagement looks like at QMUL. These four events have made a real impact on our thinking, as they have given us the chance to work with so many partners, meet so many people, and get so much feedback.
Two pieces of feedback we will be taking into 2026 will be, “fun and enjoyable - we’d love to see you again next year!” from the Family Fun Day and “I loved it, you should do more events like this!” from the Science Fun Day. It’s been amazing to hear such enthusiasm from our communities, and we will be working hard to make our events and engagement more accessible, inclusive and fun than ever.