For The Analytical Scientist Power List 2025, we asked readers to submit short essays to three crucial questions for the field, including: “What should be done to help analytical science rise to prominence as the keystone of all good science?” Several important themes emerged from the top 10 essays – as selected by our judging panel – including the need for a cultural shift that elevates analytical scientists from their perceived “support” role, closer collaboration between academia and industry, and better engagement with the public.
Sinéad Currivan-Macdonald, whose essay ranked third, took a slightly different track – she made a strong case for grass-roots infrastructure and industrial investment in analytical science education. “This should be through industrial-sponsored student spaces, sponsored laboratory infrastructure, and the integration of new technologies, such as augmented reality, to bridge the gap between education and experience,” she wrote.
Currivan herself has spent time under the tutelage of some of the field’s foremost educators and leaders, including Frantisek Švec at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Peter Schoenmakers at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Michael Breadmore, at the University of Tasmania, Australia. And her current role is as Lecturer and Principal Investigator at Technological University Dublin, Ireland, is primarily focused on teaching.
In this interview, we delve further into Currivan-Macdonald’s views on how education, infrastructure, and industry engagement can shape the future of analytical science.
What is the current state of instrumentation labs in an educational context?
In many cases, not all, the instrumentation is somewhat out of date. As an example: when I started at my institution in 2020, many of the instruments were obsolete but functioning. As a result, there was a clear deficit between the theory we were teaching and the instruments at our disposal. After updates to our infrastructure, newer technologies were introduced, and this was transformative for the student experience. Now, students are using software programmes to develop their own methods, plan injection sequences, and watch it all unfold on the screen in real time – alongside the autosampler’s robotic arm in action; the engagement has completely changed. We are lucky that our students have access to modern equipment for most of their undergraduate studies, which isn’t always the case. Nonetheless seeing the equipment, and its application in a real-world environment? That is a gamechanger for so many.
If we imagine a dedicated analytical-science training hub, who do you think should fund it?
Companies spend money on marketing tours – showing off their brand-new instruments at conferences, and at launch events in hotels and conference rooms. Essentially, they’re trying to get people engaged with new equipment. Why can’t that be adapted into an arm of educational outreach? It would show that the company is engaging with the public, and it’s in their interest too – because they’re essentially investing in the future of the workforce if they support the training of students who might one day work with their instruments and even sell them.
Government partnerships could work too, in an ideal world. If we had a central campus where universities could transport students to, where they’d spend a day, with cutting-edge technologies, no worries about security issues, or intellectual property issues. Or as I wrote about, some sort of augmented reality, giving students a “day-in-the-life" experience without the concerns of a site visit. I’ve seen this tech being used for industrial applications already, so why not extend this, or a version of this to education. That kind of experience would really change how people engage with analytical science as they move through their studies. This stops short of student internships and placements, which are harder to get access to.
Do we put enough emphasis on the importance of education for the analytical science field as a whole?
I think that we did once, but that’s changed over time, and undergraduate training has suffered. There is a perception – which isn’t limited to analytical science – that being a good academic means publishing a lot of papers and overseeing a big team of researchers. That’s great, and has its merits of course, but there are amazing, inspirational scientists who don’t fit that mould. The perish or publish mentality has taken over a bit, and it doesn’t help that national/international agencies and institutes are pushing this idea and then wondering why students are lacking basic competencies. I know there are other factors at play there too. It feels as if education has become a secondary concern in many universities.
So, the emphasis on education is lost. It’s also worth pointing out that being a “successful” scientist doesn’t mean you’re a good communicator. And it doesn’t mean you can actually teach. Education requires training, and specialist knowledge, and so does research. We now see this reflected in training programmes for academics on tenure track or at entry level, so that emphasis is changing, or at least it feels like it is.
How can analytical science educators spark excitement in students?
Engagement and excitement go hand in hand. If I can use an example from my experience; analytical chemistry classes are never the favourite topic; students, quite frankly, hate the content – no matter how much you jazz it up, or add context, they find it daunting and intense. To help, I’ve been using more UDL resources, especially those from ChromAcademy (the animations are fantastic!), and in-class polling systems like Vevox. Textbooks are great but, for my neurodiverse students or those with learning issues like dyslexia, accessibility and adaptability is the issue. So, the question is how can you get all students excited about the subject? Experience breeds empathy, so they need to listen to the lived experiences of others, and see these topics happen in real-life. This year I started a seminar series, where some very kind people in my network (thanks guys!) offered five to ten minutes for an informal chat about instrumentation and theory. This seminar covered a range of careers from biotechnology, metabolomics, to new standards for climate science and metrology. I sat down with them and asked about the techniques they use day to day. Nothing super scripted – just informal conversations. And their stories really resonated with the students, who came back to me saying it completely changed their outlook on their future careers – that they suddenly felt like so many options were open to them. It’s not often you get a thank you email from your students!
Analytical science sits at the cross-section of so many fields, but students don’t always see the breadth of opportunities. You can apply it to medical science and diagnostics; you can go into materials science; or archaeology – like the recent study in nature where lipids on bronze age cups that reveal when toddlers were weaned onto non-human milk. Analytical science answers, or helps to answer, all of that. So that’s another thing we need to reflect on as a community. As wonderful as it is that people are making incredible discoveries, if we want to bring up the next generation, we need to translate what we do into forms that everyone can understand; that’s when engagement and excitement can spark.
Do we need more resources like ChromAcademy?
I think we do, and even more adaptive types of resources; something that can change with the needs of the student. Students often come to me asking for different kinds of resources because they might be dyslexic, dyspraxic, neurodiverse, etc. They might find textbooks very difficult to access. I know that Chuck Lucy and Daniel Harris changed the Quantitative Chemical Analysis book to be more accessible, with descriptions on diagrams, links to relevant videos and so on, which really, really helps. But the legacy of universities is that they were built for the elite – and a lot of textbooks still reflect that. The community we have in STEM is changing as more people have access to education, and rightly so. But we have to adapt our material to reflect that change in community, and I think there is still some progress to be made there.
In reality, there are still huge hurdles for some students, so we’re not yet on a level playing field, these are more financial hurdles. Funding can be an issue too for some, who may fall through the cracks of government grant systems, industry does help here. We have an earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship programme, now across the country, which is heavily supported by industrial partners, and we are seeing increased interest in this training route year on year.
What other kinds of outreach or public-engagement approaches do you think could help people connect with analytical science in their own communities?
I feel like science communicators would have a much better idea on outreach and engagement! I think you need to reflect on the needs of your local community, and that sometimes isn’t very clear, or easy to do. Public information sessions and events on drug analysis and awareness are useful, especially in the context of forensic analysis. In environmental science, for example, we see citizen-science projects for water analysis, where they get people to go out and take measurements. They gather data from all around the country – and it’s been great for public engagement. And the policies we’re getting handed down as academics – from the powers that be in our universities – all emphasise public engagement. It’s a requirement for career progression.
In some fields that’s much easier. Outreach with children is often much more accessible and rewarding, as it all seems magical, but try to get a room full of sceptical adults engaged? Hard work. In Australia, they had “Pint of Science,” where (analytical) scientists would go to the pub and give a session to whoever wanted to listen. Mostly PhD students talking about their projects. Sisters in Science (Mimi, Noor, and Lotte) have done outstanding work in the Netherlands regarding representation of women and minority groups in science. So, there are initiatives to get people engaged. But I think this is often left to the scientists themselves to initiate, and these require a lot of time; most people would say they just don’t have it. They’re under so much pressure already: teaching, research, and then outreach on top of that.
We have many pharmaceutical industries locally, and it would be great to see more dialogue with them regarding public outreach.
Do you think the challenges you’ve described – around perception, resources, accessibility and scientific literacy – are specific to analytical chemistry?
No, I think its systemic across STEM to different degrees. I only have experience with chemistry, and from that perspective it was never a popular topic at school, and analytical chemistry was always the “tough” lecture that everyone expected to struggle with at university.
I think people are threatened by how difficult they perceive it to be. Chemistry is quite abstract. You’re thinking about things, imagining things, watching reactions happen in your mind’s eye during a lecture, or following them on paper. It’s a lot more theoretical in some ways, and practicals don’t always match up to the schedule of taught content, so the application is out of sync. Engagement is easier when you can see things in practice, outside the lab, in the everyday. That’s where resources like Compound Interest are great for demonstrating the chemistry (not quite analytical) in the every day. I think it was in the new Quantitative Chemical Analysis book –were it mentions: The analytical scientist turns the invisible into the visible. That really resonated with students too. It made them stop and think: Oh – that’s what we’re doing.
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