Reuben Student wins Departmental Prize for Public Engagement
Cillian Gartlan with his supervisor, Prof. Miles Carroll
Reuben member Cillian Gartlan, (DPhil in Clinical Medicine) has been awarded the Nuffield Department of Medicine Prize for Public Engagement for his contributions to Public Engagement events and activities for their research interests, science or research group. The College contacted Cillian and asked him about the work he did for his award.
Cillian was nominated for the award by his supervisor Professor Miles Carroll for engagement activities relating to Cillian’s research into vaccine-associated enhanced disease (VAED) an important topic in vaccine safety. Shortly after joining Prof. Carroll’s group, which studies high-consequence emerging viruses, Cillian set up the group’s Twitter account (https://twitter.com/Carroll_Lab_Ox). There, he summarises the group’s research papers and review articles. Earlier this year, Cillian published a review article on VAED and wrote a Twitter thread to summarise the main arguments of the review, which addressed issues around some of previous preclinical vaccine studies for other coronaviruses that created fear around the possibility for VAED in SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Both scientists and non-scientists have been quoting his review article and accompanying tweets in order to dispel myths about vaccine safety on Twitter when anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant individuals tout concerns based on those previous animal studies. Cillian has also written a blog post for Reuben college, were he describes his work in more lay terms (https://reuben.ox.ac.uk/article/life-reuben-cillian-gartlan-vaccine-associated-enhanced-disease-research).
With Reuben College, Cillian has hosted and presented at the ‘Dining with Dinosaurs Student Takeover’ and at another event, the ‘Insights Festival’, students were encouraged to showcase their research in creative ways. Cillian wrote and performed a song about VAED and designed lyric cards so that audience members could join in and visualise some of the research techniques he uses .
Outside of the lab, Cillian has also been involved in a public engagement project that does not relate to his own research. He volunteered to be part of the first year of ‘Science Together Oxford’ where researchers work with community groups. Working with the Barton Neighbourhood Centre, he helped set up a weekly club where young people could meet scientists in an informal setting and use what they’ve learned to create an event for their community, which this year revolved around learning how to survive a volcanic winter.
Cillian was presented with the award at a dinner event held at Lady Margaret Hall on the 16th of November.
