Engaging with Diamond Light Source

During the 2023-24 period, Diamond has had approximately 7,638 significant interactions with visitors. These include 3,515 for scientific and technical events – a significant increase from 2,890 in the previous year – with over 1,000 PhD students amongst them. In addition, we welcomed 1,448 school pupils/students, 1,391 members of the public and 540 high level and VIP visitors. We have also continued our efforts to making Diamond accessible to a wide range of audiences, continuing to offer hybrid or virtual efforts wherever possible.

Building on the success of developing the core programme to include both in- person and virtual events post-pandemic, the Public Engagement team’s focus this year has been on increasing the accessibility of Diamond to all audiences, which is an ongoing task aligned with the wider Communications strategy. We have therefore continued to work with our existing partners such as STFC and Science Oxford, to reach both new and larger audiences, especially those from areas with low science capital or high levels of socio-economic deprivation. Core programme activities included three schools and three general public open days, 27 undergraduate/postgraduate visits and four partnership events.

In July 2023, we were delighted to once again run a Schools/College Work Experience week for students in years 10-13. We received a record number of applications, 600 in total, and we welcomed 46 students across 23 projects, continuing the impressive number of projects and students set in the previous year for Diamond’s Work Experience Academy programme. Projects spanned all divisions of Diamond, from mechanical engineering to electron structure, and the impact of this programme is clear to see from the feedback received from the students.

Diamond achieving the Gold Award in the 2023 Employer Recognition Scheme (ERS).

Diamond has continued its commitment to widening participation and dedicated more efforts towards community engagement, working with groups such as the Amos Bursary, Science Oxford, the Careers Transition Partnership and the Social Mobility Foundation, delivering and supporting outreach activities in a variety of formats to audiences with lower science capital.

Diamond also continues to support the Armed Forces Community through our commitment to the Armed Forces Covenant. On Thursday 5th October 2023, representatives from Diamond proudly attended a ceremony at HMS Warrior in Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard to receive our Employer Recognition Scheme Gold Award; the Ministry of Defence’s highest badge of honour in recognition of supporting the Armed Forces Community.

In 2023, Diamond also began the planning for the biggest public engagement activity in eight years – the large-scale Harwell Open Week, which took place in July 2024. The week aimed to bring visitors to the Harwell to share the incredible work (and its impact) undertaken on site with our diverse communities, to engage and involve under-served communities and enable participants to feel that “science and technology are for people like me”.

Our work with students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level continues to play a vital role in Diamond’s wider mission to be a world-leading centre for synchrotron science and to keep the UK at the forefront of scientific research. Our student-dedicated programmes aim to welcome and harness the talent, curiosity and development of students both at undergraduate and postgraduate level and provide them with exciting opportunities to encourage and nurture a career in STEM, ultimately contributing to the wider skills agenda in the UK.

In 2023, 22 joint-PhD students joined Diamond as part of our 2023 PhD cohort. These doctoral projects are linked with 18 universities and other world-leading facilities. This brings the total number of active Diamond PhD Studentships to 110. In order to streamline processes internally, this year we limited the open call for PhD proposals within Diamond to one to two projects per science group, therefore we received 21 submissions for our 2024 Diamond Doctoral Studentship call for proposals, which were linked with 20 different universities and institutions. Following the internal review process, in October 2024 we will be welcoming 17 students from the open call, plus four students funded by the Ada Lovelace Centre, three students in collaboration with the University of Oxford and one funded by the Royal Thai Embassy.

The 2022 Year in Industry cohort finished their placements in September, and gave their final poster session and presentations in person, giving wider Diamond staff the opportunity to gain insight into their research, challenges they faced, and results they achieved during their 12-month placement.

We were pleased to welcome 12 new Year in Industry students as part of the 2023 cohort intake in September. Since starting, the cohort have been busy progressing their projects, completing various training including public engagement and presentation skills, as well as getting involved with wider outreach activities.

In June 2023, we welcomed 12 Summer Placement students. The projects spanned life and physical sciences, engineering and software computing. After a summer of work experience, training and networking, the students presented their results to staff via a poster event in the Atrium and end of project presentations.

From L to R: (Front Row) CEOs Dr Peter Thompson (NPL) and Prof. Gianluigi Botton (Diamond), and (Second Row) Dr Richard Burguete Postgraduate Institute Director (NPL), Dr JT Janssen, Chief Scientist (NPL), Isabelle Boscaro-Clark, Head of Impact, Communications and Engagement (Diamond), Dr Adrian Mancuso, Physical Sciences Director (Diamond), and Prof. Sir Dave Stuart FRS, Life Sciences Director (Diamond).

Throughout the year, Diamond has also once again welcomed undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the UK and beyond for in person visits to Diamond to introduce them to the facility and the possibilities we offer both as a user and career pathways. We offered a range of talks and training and welcomed 746 students for this type of visit.

In March 2024, Diamond signed a new five-year agreement with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), which aims to enhance the student experience by bringing the two organisations closer together to allow students to learn about each other’s scientific portfolio. This Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will drive a closer collaboration through the formation of a Steering Committee that will help shape curriculum content to meet students’ needs.

Diamond organises a broad portfolio of scientific and technical workshops, training courses and conferences tailored towards the needs of our staff and user communities. Last year, we hosted 43 events and engaged with 3,513 scientists and engineers from all over the globe.

In August 2023, Diamond had a unique presence at the IUCr conference in Melbourne, Australia, a keystone conference for the Crystallography community, held once every three years. Focussing on science networking, technique development, and connecting light sources and research infrastructures around the world, the team help over 26 scientists at Diamond to share their outputs and research. Diamond also held a series of science engagement activities at the conference, centred at an interactive booth. This event had over 1,700 attendees and brought awareness of Diamond to a global audience.

The Diamond stand at IUCr in Melbourne was delivered to an excellent standard. As such, it became a social hub of conversation, collaboration and knowledge exchange. It was central to bringing together both potential users and other facility collaborators with our staff participating from Diamond, and it is largely responsible for the start of a number of practical collaborations between Diamond staff members and our international colleagues. The entire conference was a great success for Diamond, and the Diamond stand was a key part of the team achievement.

Adrian Mancuso, Physical Science Director and IUCr attendee

In December 2023, we hosted the 7th edition of our Early Career Scientists Symposium, which continued its astounding success in terms of attendance and impressive speakers. This event, focussed on developing careers in synchrotron science, featured 23 talks from a diverse and eminent group of speakers. This year, 2023 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Drew Weissman, Chief Editor at Nature Physics David Abergel, and theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster Prof. Jim Al-Khalili joined the speaker alumnus. The symposium was by far the most popular event of the last 12 months and brought together over 750 junior scientists looking for inspiration to shape their future careers.

In March 2024, Diamond’s first ever Synchrotron Electrochemistry Workshop took place in Oxford. The event was born from discussions across two of science groups (Structures and Surfaces and Spectroscopy) to showcase the opportunities that exist across these disciplines at Diamond. Collaborative teamwork resulted in an inaugural event that stimulated a new user community to start discussing proposals and how Diamond could enable their research.

Diamond’s science and facility continued to inspire the public, and the media with a range of stories. Samples from the asteroid Bennu, brought back to Earth as part of NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission, were brought by a research team from the Natural History Musem, and a number of filming events took place, with coverage expected later in the year.

Project M was a large-scale citizen-science project, started at Diamond in 2017. Using the I11 beamline a research team partnered with over 1000 student scientists from 110 schools around the UK to prepare and analyse samples, inspiring a generation of future innovators. A paper on this work was published in the journal CrystEngComm, and The Guardian and Observer newspapers covered the impressive impact on the work done at Diamond.

A research team from the University of Kentucky has returned to Diamond on several occasions to study scrolls from Herculaneum, in hopes to use the data, and AI programming to help decipher what’s inside these precious samples without damaging them. The captivating story was filmed and shared on ITV news, with a number of other pieces looking at the story in more detail.

Diamond also launched a new video series, Leading Lights, which showcased intimate video portraits of Diamond users, discussing how their research and their science stories, helped to define who they were as a person – and how their knowledge can change the world. The eight-part series launched on YouTube over the Christmas holidays, and highlighted work done at over on-third of Diamond’s beamlines and facilities.