Professor Sinead Farrington Gives Headline Talk

St Margaret’s was proud to join together with TechFest and Apache Corporation for International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrating the achievements and scientific developments within the field of physics.

Former pupil and particle physicist, Professor Sinead Farrington, was the headline speaker of the event, which was held at Apache’s Aberdeen HQ in Kingswells. She explained what drew her towards a career in STEM and her role as a professor at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy. Second speaker, Alison McLure, also shared her career path in STEM. She also discussed her role as the Head of Scotland at the Institute of Physics.

As well as pupils from St Margaret’s, there were a number of pupils from local schools at the event. Everyone had lots of interesting and engaging questions for Professor Farrington and her two PhD students, Estifa’a Zaid and Victoria Parrish.

In addition to the talks, pupils took part in some practical workshops based around important ideas in physics:

• ‘Isaac’s Big Idea’ taught students about how forces interact with objects through storytelling and activities.
• ‘Apollo 7 Challenge’ got pupils to work in teams and use physics and engineering principles to bring an astronaut safely back to Earth.
• ‘Eureka Moment’ had pupils designing a boat using Archimedes Principle. Their challenge was to see how many marbles their boat could hold.
• ‘My Energy Future’ saw pupils work though a set of challenges to discover the alternatives to oil and gas available to us.
• ‘TechFest Mobile Planetarium’ explored the night sky and taught attendees about the history of our constellations.

A big thank you to TechFest and Apache for supporting us with this incredibly inspiring event.