Tag Archives: society

Building a Scientific Community – DIY for Young PIs

Posted on by
Reply

Through developing a new type of conference, we built a new scientific community – a place to openly share ideas, enjoy the support of our peers through both professional and personal bonds, and promote our trainees. Here’s how.

By Gabriel Leprivier, Thomas G. P. Grünewald, Maya Bar, Oded Rechavi, Barak Rotblat

Becoming a new PI is an exciting experience with its own set of challenges. To maximize our scientific and social impact, we asked how we could make conferences better for attendees. Could we come up with a conference format which would form a community, with an emphasis on mutual respect, trust and a spirit of collaboration?

Continue reading →

The discomfort is worth it: share more

Posted on by
Reply

Making sure to communicate with the public is hard and takes time. Scientists should keep doing it, says Jessica Eise.

When David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, wrote the New York Times bestseller Incognito, I read it voraciously. The world of the mind opened to me. My subconscious brain took on an entirely new meaning to me. Eagleman’s research felt salient, relevant, and crucial to our understanding and progress as a species.

Knowledge-sharing

{credit}Asonlobo/Wikipedia; CC-BY-SA-4.0{/credit}

Continue reading →

Science and social mobility

Posted on by
Reply

David Payne examines the links between socioeconomic status and a career in science.

“Congrats on the new job David, good to see a ‘Stabbo’ lad doing so well…”

So said Richard, a Facebook friend and former schoolmate in a reference to my status change last month, posted the night before I started working at Nature, and to our home town.

GettyImages-164210725-smaller

Stabbo — AKA Stapleford — lies on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border. One of its local authority wards has the highest percentage of lone parent householders in the borough, some of the highest rates of overcrowding, domestic abuse, and alcohol related hospital admissions and emergency asthma admissions. The latest news I heard about my home town was that its only supermarket is set to close. Its replacement? A discount store. Continue reading →

Science communication: A solution to the upcoming Brexit funding gap?

Posted on by
Reply

Effective science communication could be key to making science part of the identity of the UK, says Naturejobs journalism competition winner Helen Robertson.

Post-Brexit furor is hard to avoid in the UK media at the moment. Endless speculation surrounds what looks to be a socioeconomic experiment on a national scale, and it goes without saying that the implications will be far-reaching across all UK industries.

piggybank

Leaving the EU has been projected to cost British science one billion rapidly-falling pounds a year

Continue reading →