At the Higher Education Academy STEM Conference in April 2012 I gave a presentation about our Careers After Biological Science project at the University of Leicester. The focus of the talk was the pivotal role played by social media in recruiting speakers for careers talks, archiving various resources associated with those careers, and advertising their [...]
The best and worst of the OU
I have been a long-time admirer of the Open University; my mother completed a degree with them when I was a child and another of my relatives was one of the first ever cohorts of OU students. At a recent conference a presentation on the OU’s new “Science Investigations” module* was truly inspiring – the [...]
Yeast as a model organism
For the past eighteen months Professor Andrew Fry and I have been working with the video production team at the University of Leicester to create a series of resources about the use of model organisms in medical research. The work has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and GENIE, the [...]
A new model for interaction between science research and TV?
A fascinating thing occurred this week. The website of top-notch scientific journal Nature uploaded the preprint of a paper on research looking into the alleged benefits of brain training games. In and of itself this news may not sound revolutionary; Nature frequently publishes articles on neuroscience (and, I suspect, will be doing so more and more in [...]
Discussing Eugenics in Edinburgh
From November 20th to 22nd 2009 I took part in the Bioethics Film Festival at the Edinburgh Filmhouse. Now in its fifth consecutive year, the festival is believed by the organisers to be the only regular film festival on biomedical ethics anywhere in the world. At four sessions over the weekend, screening of the relevant film(s) was [...]
Science on the Telly: “And the winner would be…”
At the risk of sounding like a Carlsberg advert, “The Journal of the Left-handed Biochemist doesn’t do award ceremonies, but if we did…” – what would be the winner of “Best Science programme” during the last 12 months? In truth, I think it has been a bumper year for science programmes. There has been a tangible [...]
