To my mind, the difference between lecturing an audience about a project and true outreach is accepting feedback from the audience, and allowing that feedback to improve the final outcome. Having a conversation about the choices that are made in the project, and being able to objectively defend and explain them, can only make for stronger science leading to increased confidence in results.

One of the very first people that I reached out to is an oil and gas engineer, whose day to day work focusses on piping, filtration and transit of fluids. He is, therefore, something of an expert in many of the mechanical aspects of olfactometer, although he tends to work on a somewhat larger scale! Once we had arrived at a common language, him not blinding me with fluid dynamics and me not retaliating in Latin binomials, we were able to have a productive series of meetings which went a long way in shaping my initial thoughts on how this machine should operate.

These meetings were particularly useful when digesting some of the more technical papers on dual-choice olfactometer design.

In March 2014 I introduced the project to, as then, first year undergraduate biological sciences students. This introduction was simply a 5 minute slot within a lecture that I was giving. I was very pleased that some students expressed an interest in taking part in the project workshops. Unfortunately, due to the time in the semester in terms of the student’s examinations and deadlines it was the wrong time to schedule these workshops. These workshops will now take place early in the autumn semester, reviewing the design and build process, and working on the testing and experimental design.

A landmark meeting took place at the start of May 2014, where I was able to get a group of my fellow PhD students to discuss the project direction. Following an initial introduction and outline of my early design there was well over an hour of discussion, diagramming and gesticulation. All helping to further refine and define the design. Perhaps more importantly, the meeting started a long running conversation, I can bring up this project with any or all of these postgrads and they know exactly what I am talking about and can get straight into the meat of the issue at hand.