Sometimes, you don’t know what you can do until you get a chance to try…

Together with staff and undergraduate and PhD students from the University of Dundee, we are launching a citizen science project to engage secondary school students with science in particular, those from the early years, when they haven’t decided yet if science is something for them (currently in S1 and S2). 

We follow the motto that sometimes, people don’t know what they can do until they actually have a chance to do it, which is what happened to two historical figures from Dundee, Williamina Fleming and Joanna Mackie. Having gone to the USA to work as maids, they landed in the house of the Director of the Harvard Observatory, who soon realised they were too intelligent to be just maids and employed them as part of their “women computers” team to analyse large amounts of data on variable stars. 

We follow this example with the “Williamina and Joanna School for Variable Stars”. Using data from the North-PHASE Legacy Survey, acquired by the Javalambre Observatory in Spain, we want to give an opportunity to youths from around the area to come to the University and learn about how stars form and evolve while contributing to real science, discovering and studying new variable stars in young stellar clusters and beyond.

The project is designed as a long-term, out-of-school activity, where pupils will come to the University of Dundee roughly once a month for January/June and September/December. In addition to this, we will run two science fairs at the Mills Observatory towards the end of each session (June 2026, December 2026) where the pupils will be able to show their families and friends what they have been working on. 

The first cohort of pupil citizen scientists is starting in January 2026 and we are fully booked, but please contact Aurora Sicilia-Aguilar if you are interested in joining for future sessions.

Stay posted for updates and more!