Keeping the light on: communicating science in 2020
05 June 2020
I've been working with the British Science Association for over six years. The 2020 British Science Festival, of course, has been cancelled, but the directors of the festival have nonetheless made seven Award Lectures, as they do every year. Hopefully, they will deliver their lectures next year.
I've interviewed all seven, and you can read the posts on the BSA blog. Scroll down and enjoy insights into cutting-edge science with brilliant early-career researchers.
Dr Meera Joshi is the 2020 Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture winner for Engineering, Technology and Industry.
Mortality rates from sepsis can be as high as 25%. Spotting the signs early is critical to improving a patient’s chances of survival. Meera Joshi is working on a project to provide vulnerable patients with wearable sensors – and the results so far have been dramatic.
Read Beating sepsis with wearable sensors – the future
Dr Xinyuan Wang is the 2020 Daphne Oram Award Lecture winner for Digital Innovation.
Xinyuan lived for fifteen months in a factory town in China, learning how young people are using social media to craft new identities for themselves. More recently, she has just finished field work in Shanghai, exploring how older people are embracing digital in surprising ways. What can her work tell us about the way the online and offline worlds are interacting in our lives?
Read Life online: the new authentic?
Dr Richard Tyser is the 2020 Charles Darwin Award Lecture winner for Agriculture, Biological and Medical Sciences.
Richard is investigating how embryonic heartbeats begin. What he’s found is extraordinary, and could have enormous implications for the treatment of heart disease.
Read Finding the first heartbeat
Dr Carolyn McNabb is the 2020 Margaret Mead Award Lecture winner for Social Sciences.
How important is friendship and how can it change the way our brains behave? Drawing on her work using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the relationships between friendship, stress and the brain, Carolyn is exploring the ways social networking might help develop healthy adolescent brains.
Read The relationship between friendship
Dr Chris Pak is the 2020 Jacob Bronowski Award Lecture for Science and the Arts.
Chris is fascinated by terraforming. He thinks that science fiction is a kind of laboratory for thought experiments that might help us rethink our strategies about climate change, the environment and a whole lot more.
Read Terraforming in the science fiction tradition
Dr Daniella Rabaiotti is the 2020 Charles Lyell Award Lecture winner for environmental sciences.
Working out of ZSL – London Zoo – Dani is using sophisticated tracking technology and big data to quantify the effects of climate change on one of Africa’s most endangered species. It’s tough work and it’s got to be done if African wild dogs have a chance of surviving.
Read How big data is tracking the impact of climate change on the African wild dog
Dr Euan Allen is the 2020 Rosalind Franklin Award Lecture winner for physical sciences and mathematics.
Working at the Quantum Engineering Technology Labs at the University of Bristol, Euan works in silicon photonics – and is investigating how to apply it to the construction of quantum computers. This emergent technology could offer unprecedented computing power. But how easy is it to develop, and who will reap the benefits?
Read Constructing quantum computers
And here are some of my posts from the 2019 British Science Festival.
The Light of Understanding: the 2019 Presidential Address by Dr Alice Roberts
Pocket blood tests by Stuart Higgins
The dark heart of the ocean by Diva Amon
21st century nanomaterials by Jess Boland
When children became evil by Laura Tisdall
Unwell in unrest by Mohammed Jawad
Are we alone in the universe? By Sarah Rugheimer
Interview with Sarah Rugheimer
And you can also check out posts from previous years on this page of my blog.
Comments