Educating Communication, Make Science Accessible

Communicate and educate! We aim at bridging the gap between the scientists doing cutting edge research and the public via interesting and accessible presentations on research papers and through the education of young researchers on communicating science to the general public.

The purpose of science has always been to move forward the frontiers of human knowledge and to push for objective truths through rigorous methodologies. However, there has been a sense in which scientists have confined the fruits of their research to their own community not in terms of being explicit gatekeepers of research (although some of that is true for papers or articles not available for public access) rather in the sense that they have not been at the forefront of communicating their results in an accessible way to the public.

The recent COVID19 pandemic has demonstrated the consequences of having a poor communication with the public in generating mistrust and misunderstanding of scientific data. We have all seen examples of vaccine hesitancy to varying degrees, and while science welcomes reasonable skepticism, the range of misinformation surrounding vaccines has been mind boggling for the medical and the administrative community.

Although, there is no quick fix to this problem, we believe that on one side we should reach out to public as a scientific community and on the other side we should also reflect on the training that is provided to young researchers in communicating science.

During the Sciathon, we will be working on the possibility to create a section in the Lindau website that would be focused on selecting a particular scientific paper every month under the different academic fields, and the authors of the papers would be invited to make a presentation of their paper in a way that is understandable by the public.

Also, our group will work on the definition of the best format within the Lindau website and during the meetings to teach young researchers about communicating science to a lay audience with simplification, while adhering to scientific accuracy.

We hope that this makes academic research more accessible to the public as well as helps in fostering the name of Lindau as a championeer of scientific pursuits throughout the world.

Skills for Project