One of the reasons ENABLE stands out among other conferences is the effort put into the outreach activities. It is a duty of scientists to continually commit to disclosing their work to the general public.

For the FEBS-IUBMB-ENABLE 2022 event we organised a series of outreach and public engagement activities, both online and face-to-face, to maximize the techniques the pandemic has taught us to appreciate, and also recover the proximity and familiarity of meetings in person.

The FEBS-IUBMB-ENABLE 2022 outreach activities started a week before the conference, in association with “Semana de la Ciencia” or Week of Science, celebrated by the University of Seville and associated institutions.

In collaboration with researchers from the team “Ciencia a la Carta”, two scientific talks were given to secondary school students. In “PCR, much more than COVID diagnose”, students were shown what the PCR technique is, and why it has become so important in these recent years. “The risk of unhealthy eating: Neurodegenerative diseases and nutrition” showed them the importance of good dietary habits and some of the long term consequences that come from bad nutrition.

In addition to this, secondary school students were invited to visit the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBiS), to learn what it means to be a scientist and see how scientific investigations of different kinds are performed.

In order for the public to gain a better understanding about the PhD part of the scientific career, the activity “What is a PhD?”, which took place in one neighbourhood of Seville, allowed them to interact with four researchers at different steps of their scientific career, who shared their experiences of one of the most crucial steps for a scientist.