Senga Robertson-Albertyn won the inaugural Early Career Researcher of the Year award for work carried out during the course of her PhD studies. She views public engagement as integral to her life sciences research and this is only the latest of the awards she has won for her work in communicating research to the public. One of the first projects she developed helped teach children and communities about the bacteria that live in our gut. In this ‘Microbe Motels’ project Senga’s new ways of engaging others were so successful that she and colleagues published the work in a peer-reviewed journal.