With a trivia night and other fun activities featured in Bendigo on Wednesday night, road trip participant and University of Sydney honours student Jacinta May was hopeful young people would be inspired to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

"We're just enthusiastic scientists willing to give more enthusiasm to younger scientists and budding amateurs," Ms May said.

"Most of us on the trip are PhD students who are going through the academic track, but there is so much out there in terms of industry experience.

"It's such an emerging field that even the jobs we have today, for the generations that we are talking to, we don't even know what kind of landscape they'll be going into when they graduate."

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Jacinta's research involves investigating, fabricating and measuring various types of topological quantum devices and, while that may sound intimidatingly brainy, she's keen to get everyone involved.

"A lot of people find science inaccessible, particularly more complex fields, just like dark matter and quantum physics, because there's a lot of math and there's a lot of formal education that has to go into understanding exactly what they are," she said.

"But I'm the biggest proponent of people being a bit determined and trying out something new.

"You don't need to be some sort of high level genius to get into it, there's so much nuance in the field.

"People can be intimidated but any and all ages, I'm not just talking schools here, anyone can learn about quantum or dark matter."

The road trip from August 9 to August 26 takes the brainy folk across the country from Brisbane to Perth, and stops in many regional and rural communities as well as major cities - sharing all things dark matter and quantum. But what does that even mean?

"Quantum is all about the very, very, very small things," Ms May said.

"So there's a lot of power to things that unintuitively happened at the very small level, particles can actually teleport, they can become entangled with each other, they can do all of these spooky things.

"There's very interesting phenomena that happens at the quantum level and those phenomena are what we're looking to exploit for applications which we can use in computing we can use in sensing.

"And dark matter is one of the universe's great mysteries much like quantum."

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Ms May explained that Australia is one of the key players in the quest to figure out dark matter, but so far experts believe it accounts for about 84 per cent of the matter in the universe.

"We've got plenty of scientists across the country, developing experiments to actually understand what dark matter even is, because we don't know," she said.

"That includes one of the first underground labs in the southern hemisphere actually in Stawell."

It was exposure to the work of scientists that first got a young Ms May interested in this hugely fascinating field and now she hopes to be that inspiration for someone else.

"I was exposed to it as a school student, in much the same way that we're exposing some of the communities and schools that we are visiting at the moment," she said.

"And I fell in love with it since then, and afterwards, I studied physics, I studied math, I studied chemistry, and I took that further, and I got into research as an academic now at the University of Sydney.

"I just want to emphasize that we want to inspire all of the scientists of the future that there is no field too hard for you or too challenging for you to get into and Australia is placed at such a cutting edge and [is] one of the best positions in the world."

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