An unusual route to presenting public engagement to a microbiology audience
19 September 2012
Emma Trantham is working towards her PhD in the School of Veterinary Sciences. Here she describes her journey from canvassing votes on Twitter to her winning a trip to San Francisco to give a talk about public engagement to a microbiology audience.
Emma Trantham delivering her talk
In January 2012, I came across a fantastic opportunity circulating on Twitter – the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) was running a competition for scientists to propose talks for its General Meeting. People would vote for their favourite topics and the proposers of the top 5 topics would win the chance to present that topic at the meeting in San Francisco and would receive a travel grant to help them get there!
Image by Mark O. Martin
I gave it a go. My proposed topic was focussed on public outreach by scientists, something that I care passionately about, and was titled: ‘When ‘communicating bacteria’ doesn’t just refer to quorum sensing: public engagement in the 21st century’.
The talk showcased some excellent examples of outreach in the field of microbiology. The first was the Belly Button Biodiversity project which asked members of the public to swab their belly buttons and identified the different bacteria that were found.
I began working on canvassing votes through various social media vehicles (Facebook, Twitter and my personal blog) and also through the Bristol Microbiology Forum, which is a network of scientists engaged in microbiology or infection immunology research in the Bristol region. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm shown by those who I contacted – with many people passing the link on to their friends and colleagues.
As it turned out, my efforts were not in vain - in March I was thrilled to learn that mine was one of the top 5 topics, which meant in June, I flew out to (an unusually sunny) San Francisco. The conference lasted for 3 days and my talk was in the very last session on the third day. Despite my (prolonged!) nervousness, the audience created a warm atmosphere, which quickly put me at ease.
I discussed how research suggests that there is no one defined way to do public engagement - different audiences engage with science in different ways. I was only able to cover a few of the many different ways in which scientists become involved in outreach both offline and online, but was able to effectively communicate the point that researchers who wanted to get involved with public engagement should consider who it was they were trying to reach and then play to their own strengths.
I hope through my talk, I inspired those scientists that were not previously involved with outreach to give it a go and gave them some idea of different tools for engagement that can be utilised in this field.
The talk showcased some excellent examples of outreach in the field of microbiology. The first was the Belly Button Biodiversity project which asked members of the public to swab their belly buttons and identified the different bacteria that were found. I also discussed the Society for General Microbiology’s ‘Stopping Superbugs’ drama that gives audiences a chance to learn about MRSA both by watching the drama and by asking questions to the experts. Finally, I spoke about Anna Dumitriu’s beautiful MRSA Quilt.
I hope through my talk, I inspired those scientists that were not previously involved with outreach to give it a go and gave them some idea of different tools for engagement that can be utilised in this field. Most of all, I hope I persuaded them that outreach is not only deeply important, but can also be a lot of fun too!
Emma Trantham, School of Veterinary Sciences
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