Saiful Islam is the Faraday Institution Community Award Winner 2024#
Professor Saiful Islam, St Anne’s Fellow, University of Oxford, receives the Faraday Institution Community Award 2024 for Public Engagement / STEM Outreach
. Prof. Islam was elected to the Chemical Science section of Academia Europaea in 2021.
Academia Europaea congratulates Prof. Islam to this distinction!#
About Prof. Islam
(quoted from The Faraday Institution)#
Saiful Islam continues to make outstanding and impactful contributions to science communication, outreach activities and the promotion of STEM to large numbers of school students and the general public at a local, national and international level.
From setting world records with the largest lemon batteries to highlighting the outcomes of the CATMAT project via social media, Saiful has shown on numerous occasions how impactful initiatives can be for inspiring the next generation of scientists and to engage the general public with research into energy storage.
School Outreach#
In the last three years, Saiful has presented talks to more than 2,000 school students at the ‘Education in Action’ days in London, university open days and Royal Society events. He developed the innovative use of 3D images and 3D glasses for the audience to illustrate the crystal structures of battery materials related to the CATMAT project that he leads. For example, in March 2024, he presented the keynote lecture at the Royal Society Student Conference to 350 school students. Q&A sessions provide opportunities for students to ask questions, shifting the balance from information-giving to direct engagement with young audiences, helping to create a further buzz about the global challenge related to climate change.
Public Engagement#
In October 2023, he was invited to appear on a podcast “They’ve Made Us” (hosted by Robin Ince and Helen Czerski) to discuss two people that inspired his career. Unsurprisingly, he picked Michael Faraday as his first choice. His largest live audience was an invited talk at the Brian Cox 2022 Compendium of Reason charity event to 5,000 people at the Royal Albert Hall.
This builds on the impact from Saiful’s previous public engagement activities including as 2016 BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer, when he presented ‘Supercharged: Fuelling the Future’, attracting 3.8 million viewers. The energy theme was chosen for this 80th TV anniversary year in honour of Michael Faraday.
As part of COP-26, the Royal Society of Chemistry invited Saiful to lead an outreach video to regain the Guinness World Record for the highest voltage lemon battery using 3,000 lemons, which has been viewed on Youtube 143,000 times.
Saiful has an active presence on Twitter/X (@SaifulChemistry) with 16,000 followers. He also manages CATMAT’s project account, which has 2,000+ followers.
Articles#
Saiful has been invited by The Guardian to write 200-word pieces for their Science Stories of the Year feature. His 2023 story was on the ‘holy grail’ of the quest for a room temperature superconductor. In 2019, his piece recognised the award of the 2019 Chemistry Nobel Prize to the three pioneers of the lithium-ion battery: John Goodenough, Stan Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino.
Outreach Awards#
Professor Islam was awarded the 2023 IOM3 Robert Perrin Award, and was made a 2022 Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association; both awards were in recognition of his science outreach activities. His outreach and science communication work has been recognised by the invitation to serve for two terms on the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee.
