With our 2024 Annual Review now available to read online, we reflect on some highlights from the previous year

‘To every donor, partner and friend of the Foundation: there are no words to fully capture our gratitude. You are the driving force behind these successes. Your belief in the power of science and education transforms ambitions into action and inspires us to keep reaching higher.’ – Michel Spiro, Chair of the CERN & Society Foundation Board

Every step forward begins with a glance back. The publication of our Annual Review provides a chance to reminisce about some of the important milestones we marked in 2024. Celebrating our tenth anniversary was one of these milestones which, in turn, gave us an ample opportunity to look back at how far we have come.

Over the course of the Foundation’s history, we have grown from 5 projects reaching 60 countries to 21 projects reaching 130 countries. Our initiatives, like flagship project Beamline for Schools (BL4S), have altogether benefited 20,700 young people aged 14-19.

In 2024 alone, 3,000 students submitted proposals to BL4S – a global competition for high school students to design and perform an experiment on a real-life beamline. In terms of educational impact, we were able to further extend our reach by supporting 213 teachers to come to CERN for world-class professional development courses and 69 STEM students from non-Member States to attend the CERN Summer Student Programme.

There were also many achievements for projects pertaining to our Innovation & Knowledge Exchange pillar. A groundbreaking mathematical model from ByoDynaMo stimulates vascular tumour growth in breast cancer and predicts responses to treatment, paving the way for personalised medicine. Zenodo, following the launch of the EU Open Research Repository, onboarded 130 EU-funded projects as EU projects communities, giving researchers an easy, free solution for sharing the outputs of their research. 

The year also marked new several new beginnings, with the launch of the Non-Member State PhD Studentship Scheme, the TIMEPIX@School project, the CERN Festival Programme and the opening of the CERN Science Gateway – which welcomed 400,000 visitors in its first year of operations alone. Other long-standing projects continued to flourish, including the Arts at CERN programme which saw collaboration between 15 artists and over 350 scientists through its artistic residencies, and public events, which were able to engage 4,000 people in events directly supported by the CERN & Society Foundation.

We would like to extend our gratitude to all who made this impact possible; the CERN & Society Foundation is strong thanks to our dedicated community of supporters, partners, advocates and contributors. If you would like to help us keep up the momentum and continue our mission of connecting science and society in 2025, you can make a donation here.

Perhaps a specific project interests you?

You can read more and find information on how to donate to each one, here.