Blog Post: EDIFY Early Career Researcher Event

Post-doctoral researchers Tine Opitz, Diego Ponte, Başak İnce Çağlar, and Tamsin Parnell recently organised and hosted a successful early career researcher (ECR) event on the 1st and 2nd of July down at King’s College London. This workshop, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), focused on Science Communication with the overall goal to provide ECRs and youth advisors with engage and network with each other and develop useful skills in science communication. 

On the first day the workshop focused on networking providing opportunities for attendees to get to know one another, facilitated through organised and “speed networking” session, followed by “networking bingo”. Group discussions further aimed to utilise ECRs previous knowledge on science communication with some attendees reporting previous knowledge but lacking confidence in their skills and ideas for their projects. 

Day two focused on the development of science communication skills with training from Hawkeye media, who conducted interactive workshops on media engagement which was tailored for researchers. This included learning more about the values and perspectives that shape journalistic outputs, the ways in which research may be translated for media, a lesson on body language, and an exercise in interviewing. 

This was followed by a panel discussion with Dr Alex Christiansen and Courtney Worrell who shared valuable, hands-on experiences with our group, that included useful tips for science communication engagement.

Members of the workshop reflected on the workshop and discussed the W-Questions of science communication, such as ‘what is science communication for?’ and what their take-home messages were from their media training. Finally, they reflected on key points raised during the panel discussion all of which can be read in more detail here.