On Reddit there's a thread asking for the best advice from your profession. My advice as a communication professional, specialised in the field of science communication, would be: Remember that it's not about you, it's about them. Don’t focus solely on what you want to say, instead focus on what your stakeholders need. If you want to read more about what I mean with this, see my post Good communication starts with listening ..read more

Yesterday the LOC of the PCST 2023 (Public Communication of Science and Technology) evaluated the conference that took place on 11-14 April in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and hosted 700 participants. I have so many fond memories of the people I met, the conversations I had, the inspiring sessions I attended and I am proud of the big steps we as a LOC together with the PCST Network took to make the conference as inclusive as possible, true to its theme 'Creating common ground'. Some personal highlights: ? I am happy with the positive response that I got on my talk 'Defusing deficit thinking i ..read more

It is March 2020 and the world seems to come to an abrupt halt. An invisible and elusive danger races across the world and captures the Netherlands too. We have become part of the pandemic and Dutch people are being introduced to the grim coronavirus. The flow of information is already underway and virologists and epidemiologists are being called by the newsrooms to explain this apparent downfall of society. And they deliver - the scientists are doing what they are trained to do: explaining exactly what a virus is, how infection works, what we know and, above all, how little we actually still ..read more

The Public Awareness of Research Infrastructures (PARI) three-day conference held in July 2022 at the SKA Observatory’s Global Headquarters (U.K.) discussed the science communication issues that practitioners face at research infrastructures, like community building, science diplomacy and equity, diversity and inclusion in STEM. We concluded that we need to bring society within the walls of the scientific facilities as much as we need to help scientists engage with society. This article was originally published in the Journal of Science Communication, to be cited as: Nuijens, F. (2022). Bring ..read more

"It is to be hoped that the freshly appointed ministers and state secretaries are less concerned with image than with the content of their work. This also applies to the members of Parliament. Worrying about how something will come across and how the public will be taken in dominates the political work far too much", writes Carla Joosten in EW Magazine. Hear, hear. It has annoyed me for years that members of the government and parliament allow themselves to be governed so much by supposed images. But I miss the self-reflection of Ms Joosten and her colleagues in this opinion piece. I hope tha ..read more

Blogs Feedspot's Top 20 Science Communication Blogs and Websites World conferences The Mother of science communication conferences is the PCST. It takes place every two years. The next one is in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 2023. The PCST also has an active e-mail discussion list that is worth subscribing to. The World Conference of Science Journalists is also organized every two years and open to both journalists and communicators. The next one is in Colombia in 2022. The British Science Association organises a regular Science Communication Conference in the UK, keep an eye on their even ..read more

Say you finished a research project and you want to make your knowledge actionable. Or you have scientific facts that you want to translate into a public health policy, for instance to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The communication grid of Betteke van Ruler describes four communication strategies that you can use, divided along two axes: is the communication one-way or two-way (i.e. are there one or more senders) and is the communication aimed at revealing or influencing. Informing is one-way communication with the aim of revealing[1]. Communication grid by Betteke van Ruler. (S ..read more

Leiden has great facilities in the field of education, from pre-school care to bite-sized university education at the Faculty of Arts. Of the 120,000 Leiden residents, 55,000 are actively pursuing an education. This does not include all the people who go to a lecture, museum or library in their spare time. A city full of knowledge goes hand in hand with a highly educated population. For example, one tenth of the more than 350 members of the Association for Science Journalism and Communication Netherlands live and/or work in Leiden. The potential of this curious population is expressed in many ..read more

"What is the purpose of your visit to the United States?" The grumpy homeland security officer snarls at me at the airport. "I'm going to the ScienceOnline conference in Raleigh, North Carolina," I say enthusiastically. "If it's science online, why do you have to come here?", he answers with a grimace as if he thinks he's punctured my weak excuse. Without knowing it, he has grasped the essence of ScienceOnline: bringing people who only meet online together in real life to exchange experiences. Wide audience I go to congresses more often where communicating about science is the main theme. But ..read more

If you regularly do a Twitter search for the words "science journalism," like I do, you'll be amazed, amused and sometimes shocked by the amount of bashing science journalism takes in the Twittersphere. It shows that not all science journalism is created equal, and it's a sign of the times, really: Not all journalists who write about science are actually science journalists. They're general journalists who were -- willingly or out of necessity -- given a science story to cover that day. Newsrooms are under pressure. Revenues are down, budgets are being cut, and journalists are losing their jo ..read more