The EGU Outreach Committee has named Miguel Gomez-Heras and Solmaz Mohadjer as the winners of the first EGU Public Engagement Grants competition. The €1000 grants are awarded to EGU members interested in developing an outreach project that aims to raise awareness of geosciences outside the scientific community. Gomez-Heras will use the funds to organise a stratigraphy fieldtrip for people with visual impairment, while Mohadjer will produce a series of earthquake videos for educational purposes.

Gomez-Heras’ project “will entail designing and carrying out a 1-day geological fieldtrip to Riba de Santiuste (Guadalajara, Spain) targeted to 35 people with different degrees of visual impairment (from short-sighted to blind people),” he writes in his winning proposal. The project builds on previous experience of a group of geologists who last year organised a successful fieldtrip to a Spanish geological site for people with deafblindness.

Mohadjer’s project “aims to create a series of video lessons on earthquake education in order to enable easy and effective access to science-based hazard information that has potential to save lives,” according to her proposal. The videos would be visual versions of lesson plans Mohadjer and her colleagues developed in the past. The lesson plans were tested in schools in Tajikistan, China and Haiti and were ultimately adopted by Teachers Without Borders as their official teacher’s guide to earthquake education.

Miguel Gomez-Heras is a researcher at the Geosciences Institute of the Spanish National Research Council and the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He co-founded and chairs the association Ciencia sin Barreras (Science without Barriers), which aims to promote science among people with special needs and those who do not have ready access to scientific knowledge.

Solmaz Mohadjer is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany. During her undergraduate degree, she worked with school children, inmates in correctional facilities, and refugees in community centers as a science tutor. She also worked with Teachers Without Borders, training teachers around the world in adapting and using earthquake educational materials.

• More information about EGU Public Engagement Grants.