All Posts

In this post of the Careers in Science Communication blog series, you’ll hear from Susan Keown, a staff writer at the non-profit Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

This post was contributed by guest blogger Jack Leeming Editor of Naturejobs, part of Nature magazine.

Humans are built to enjoy, remember, and listen to narratives — take advantage of that in your work

The part of my job I most enjoy is building and telling interesting stories — whether I’m working with a talented journalist to shine light on living as a scientist in Beijing, talking to people about taking beautiful photographs of their studies, reporting on amazing women in science, or asking someone how and why they left academia. Humans are designed to pay attention and enjoy anecdotal forms of information — identifying with a character, building emotional investment and following cause-and-effect relationships are all things almost all of us are programmed to appreciate and understand.

This series was written for selfish reasons: I wanted to learn about careers in science communication. When I started my Science Communication Internship with Addgene, I didn’t know a lot about scicomm, but had enjoyed writing a few Addgene guest blog pieces. Throughout my internship, my interest in scicomm has grown and now it feels like an awesome bionerd hobby but also a viable away-from-the-bench career option. So if you’re interested in learning more about science communication careers, you’re in the right place. For this series, I’ll interview three science communicators who work in the biotech, education, or nonprofit industries.

This post was contributed by guest blogger Sarah Schmidt, a Marie Curie Fellow at The Sainsbury Laboratory.

Are you a science student or early career researcher looking to break into science communication? Everybody goes about this in their own way. The career paths into science communication are as varied as the field itself. Among other things, science communication comprises broadcasting, science writing, and certain aspects of art and education. If you suspect that science communication might be for you, don’t wait. Start communicating now. These 9 strategies will get you started: 

What are scientists up to on Twitter? Prior to writing this post, my interest in Twitter was fleeting. I’ve had an account for three years and have only tweeted 6 times: #fail. I’d hoped to use Twitter professionally to network, learn more about alternative careers for scientists, and share cool science. Unfortunately, it never clicked for me. Recently my interest was renewed in part due to FOMO  but mostly because of this article: “A systematic identification and analysis of scientists on Twitter.” This paper addresses the following questions about scientists on Twitter: who are they? What do they share? And how they are connected? Here are the highlights written as 8 tweetable facts.

Note: The images used in this post were created using data from or modified from Ke et al. 2017.