When mother-of-three Michelle Quinn heard a scientist was coming to talk to her young mothers’ group in Dundalk, she was “dreading it”.
“I was so bad at science at school,” she says, and “massively hated it”. But within the first 20 minutes of listening to Dr Niamh Shaw, an engineer, scientist, writer and performer, she was hooked.
“It made me realise that I actually do want to learn more and that I am interested in science per se,” says 32-year-old Quinn, who is out of work and on disability benefits due to severe Crohn’s disease. It also gave her confidence to go home and teach her children, Hannah (14), Troy (11), and Macey (three), about topics being discussed at Shaw’s weekly Town Scientist sessions, run in conjunction with the Louth ABC (Area Based Childhood) programme.
“They’d be laughing at me coming home,” says Quinn, “asking me ‘What did you learn today?’,” - because she is always inquiring of them “How’s school, what did you do today?”
Shaw has developed Town Scientist as a social enterprise. The aim is to break down barriers to information about science and technology and to foster better understanding of complex issues, such as artificial intelligence and climate change, and what these will mean for local communities. With funding from Research Ireland, she has piloted it this year with Louth ABC in her native Dundalk and at Birr Castle Demesne in Co Offaly. She hopes further funding will enable her to expand its scope in 2025.
Quinn was not only enthused by Shaw’s engaging explanations over six weekly sessions about matters such as outer space, the aurora borealis and the potentially apocalyptic signs of climate change that she has seen first-hand in Antarctica, but also Shaw’s inspiring life story.
“Listening to her, it has given me the motivation to be like, well, ‘I’m not just a mam stuck at home with a disability who can’t do stuff’,” adds Quinn.
At the age of 10, Shaw dreamt of going to space. But by the age of 15, she had quashed that ambition, not knowing how to even begin to make it happen. “I didn’t see that in my line of sight, because there were no female astronauts. But also, I grew up in a modest, very nice housing estate in Dundalk. And no one around me aspired to do anything outside of Dundalk or Ireland.” She forged her way in engineering and then a food-science career, until she felt lab research was not for her and switched to full-time acting. Her roles included Frances McGuigan in the RTÉ soap Fair City in 2007-2008 and more than a decade in improv comedy “that really opened me up”.
As she set about creating her first theatre show, That’s About the Size of It, in 2011 with Anu Productions, she started to review choices she had made at different stages of her life, and how they had led her on some paths and drawn her away from others. “I nearly stayed on in London in my first job working for the London Underground, which has developed into a passion for public transport. I could have stayed married.
“My first marriage was very brief, so I didn’t have any kids as a consequence of that. So what if I had had been a mother? I looked at all those choices and one of them was, ‘What if I had become an astronaut?’”
It was supposed to be a lighthearted part of that show, she explains. But when she contacted the European Space Agency (ESA), which then sent her a flight suit they use for training astronauts, “it suddenly became very accessible”. In creating an astronaut version of herself for the stage, she realised there was no reason she could not have pursued that in real life.
“I was desperately sad and disappointed in myself. At that time in my life I was making theatre, so the next show [To Space] was about why don’t we realise the dreams that we really want in our life, and I talked about mine.” Having thought the play would wrap up that childhood dream, Shaw instead found people saying to her, “Well, you’ve got to go to space”.
A first step towards that revitalised dream was writing an article in this newspaper in February 2014 about how she had devoted the year to exploring how to get to space. “I knew that if I went public, then I couldn’t back out.”
She was propelled into a new phase “where all these different parts of me finally started coming together: the logical, the engineer, the finance, the writer, the communicator, the performer, all of that, and my values around education for all and equality”. A course she did in practical science communication in Cambridge opened her eyes to the sociological aspects of education around science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem).
[ Meet the Irish women aiming to become space trailblazersOpens in new window ]
“What it showed me was that a child really is the product of the house that they came out of.”
If their family is not talking about science, the likelihood of them having a career in a related field is much lower than in a household where such matters are discussed. “Whether the child decides to have a career in science or not isn’t the issue, the issue is whether they can see that they have the potential for that in their life. That was the thing that I wanted to change.”
Shaw, author of Dream Big (Mercier Press), has immersed herself in writing and social media assignments with ESA and Nasa, attending launches and landings of astronaut crews, and experiencing a zero-gravity flight, among other things. She was also invited to join an all-women expedition to Antarctica last year.
Grateful for all the speaking engagements that have come on the back of her work, she is conscious that people attending those events are mostly already well tuned into Stem. Shaw wants to reach more marginalised groups and set her sights on parents, mindful of their influence on the upcoming generation.
Louth ABC was a launch pad for her vision in 2022, for which so many strands of her life have aligned. She sees the Town Scientist pilot as a template that could be replicated elsewhere by like-minded professionals.
Meanwhile, her life mission is to get to space “as artist and citizen”. She does not know when or how that might happen, but she is confident that as she continues to build her reputation and audience as a science communicator, the opportunity will come. “It’s not a quick fix thing, it will come from the body of work.” She is intent on sharing how the joy of learning connects to aspiring to live a life that “makes most sense” to an individual.
“The story you tell yourself limits you, and the lovely thing about science, and particularly about cosmology or astrophysics is, it makes you see yourself as just part of something much, much bigger in the universe.” It is having humans in space, she believes, that helps us see the bigger picture of our role on this planet as it undergoes climate change.
“As humans, we have to realise that our existence is part of a very long relay, and the purpose is for our civilisation, or for the human species, to continue to survive.”
Marius Pieniazek was unaware Nasa is planning to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s until he heard about it from Shaw at a Town Scientist session in Drogheda. Then he was “honestly shocked” as she talked about her participation in a simulated Mars mission in the Utah desert. For two and a half weeks, she and four crewmates were “analogue” astronauts, living in a cramped, pressurised mock space station as if they were on Mars and having to don space suits to venture outside for tasks. “I actually started thinking if there was an opportunity for me to do something like that, I would probably sign up for it,” says Pieniazek. “It’s really inspiring.”
The father-of-one is on a career break, having been made redundant by PayPal in August, and he attended Town Scientist sessions run for parents at his son Andy’s primary school in Drogheda. The regular group of eight to 10 people were from different backgrounds and cultures.
“Sometimes it was clash of opinions, and I couldn’t just keep up because it was so fiery a discussion,” laughs 43-year-old Pieniazek, who came to Ireland from Poland nearly 20 years ago. “But it’s really great to see how people interact in a group like this.”
Also a writer himself, having fantasy stories published in Poland, he thinks of Shaw as “a kindred spirit”, with valuable knowledge and experiences on making life changes. “When we learned about how she came to where she is right now, it was just like ‘wow’, you could actually make a movie on that,” he adds.
Another member of the Polish community, Zuzanna Piskorowska, heard about Town Scientist through workshops organised by the Incredible Years parenting programme for parents of children with ADHD. Her highly intelligent six-year-old son David is autistic and is taking courses in architecture and engineering at DCU’s Centre for Talented Youth. She enrolled for Town Scientist through Louth ABC to help him.
“My son keeps asking me all these questions I simply don’t know the answers to. He will ask me about fusions on the sun or some distant planets or stuff like that. I have to Google everything.” After sessions with Shaw, Piskorowska was able to go home and start conversations about what she had learnt that day. “So he’s learning something new, and, you know, it’s kind of our bonding time as well.”
[ How Ireland is building a strong reputation in Europe’s space programmeOpens in new window ]
What’s more, Shaw has inspired her to go back to college in September, to study business as she develops a new career as a self-employed graphic designer. Piskorowska was always interested in art and design, but back in Poland her parents had told her she would never make any money, so she ended up studying civil engineering instead.
“I had no interest in it but just because I thought it was going to give me a good job... It took me 30 years to circle and go back to the design, so I don’t want that to happen to my son. If I know that he’s interested in science and space and maths and whatever, then I’m trying to support him.”
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