Yesterday, I had the pleasure of accompanying Chris Parkin, of the Museum of the History of Science (MHS), and Caroline Cheeseman, of Oxford University Museums, to the NCCPE (National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement) Engage Awards ceremony, which took place at the Natural History Museum in London. We attended because a project we had worked on at MHS, Objects of Invention, was a finalist in the STEM category. Only 23 of about 240 nominated projects had been named finalists, so we were in very good company! The Objects of Invention project provided public engagement training for engineering students at the University of Oxford (myself included) and culminated in a public event at MHS which attracted over 2000 visitors to the museum in a single day. We also carried out three schools events at the museum. The ceremony kicked off with a wonderful talk by Professor Alice Roberts about the importance of public engagement, especially for science researchers. Next, Sophie Duncan, the deputy director of NCCPE, introduced the finalists for each of the awards. For each award category, the audience was treated to a set of excellent short videos summarising the short-listed projects prior to the announcement of the category winner. The winner of the STEM category was a project called “The Enlightenment Café: Deadinburgh”. The Deadinburgh audience worked with scientists and actors to learn about epidemiology and solve a mock zombie epidemic in Edinburgh. We had the opportunity to meet some of the amazing people who had worked on other short-listed projects at a reception following the awards ceremony. The atmosphere was brilliantly upbeat, and we left with a wealth of ideas, which we will look to implement in future public engagement projects. For more information, see: https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/work-withus/competition/competition-finalists