On Thursday evening, we hosted the twelfth instalment of the monthly Science Online NYC (SoNYC) discussion series. For this month’s event, the topic for debate was  Reaching out of the ivory tower:

Reaching out of the ivory tower

Do researchers have an obligation to take their work directly to the public?  The public, through the government and charities, funds most of the US’ science research, but doesn’t generally have access to the papers that result.  Increasingly, through on- and offline tools, researcher can speak directly to the public. 

Our panel will include scientists that use various media to connect directly with the public, either about their field of expertise or about their research. They’ll talk about the challenges of balancing a career and public outreach, as well as the rewards of helping people to understand science.

Preparing for the event 

In anticipation of the discussion, we ran a series of guest posts on Soapbox Science discussing looking at how scientists can reach out of the ivory tower to communicate science more widely. Over the last two weeks, scientists, writers, enthusiasts, communicators, events organizers, policy makers, lecturers and even a comedian, shared details about how they engage and reach out to the public. Find a short summary of every guest post, plus related posts elsewhere in the blogosphere, here. Finally, you can also follow the online conversation on Twitter using the #reachingoutsci hashtag. Join in the discussion and share how you communicate science.

This month’s panel included: 

• Ethan Perlstein, who’s faculty at Princeton and promotes open access research.

• Sarah Weisberg, who helps run a program called the BioBus.

• Matt Strassler, a blogging theoretical physicist.

• And our own Jeanne Garbarino, a researcher at Rockefeller University.

Blog posts about the 12th #sonyc

Do let us know if you blog about the event and we’ll include a round-up of links here.

Live-streaming and video archiving

We live-stream each SoNYC event to give as many people as possible the chance to take part in the debate. Check out this month’s livestream, or take a look at our archives where you can view the previous meetings.

Finding out more

Stay tuned and/or watch the #sonyc hashtag for more details about the next event which will be held in August. We are taking a break for the summer, so there will be no event in July.

If you have a suggestion for a future panel or would be interested in sponsoring one of the events, please get in touch.

Storify from the event