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Project no. 230328

MY SCIENCE

MY SCIENCE European Programme for Young Journalists

Start date of project: 1 January 2009 Duration: 18 months

CSA (Support Action)Science in SocietySiS-2008-3.0.2.2: Support training activities of journalists and authors in the EU MemberStates and the associated countries in EC-funded research laboratories

Minutes of the Conference

The Final conference was divided into three sections:

The welcome speech was by Werner Stuflesser, president of EURAC, who welcomed the speakers,participants and colleagues to the conference. He spoke about the importance of communicatingscience and the various scientific communication activities of EURAC that are targeted to bridge thegap between science and society and the open nature of EURAC.A short welcome and introduction to the project My Science, and order of the day was presented byEva Maria Moar, scientific coordinator My Science.

The morning Panel presentation, debate and discussion emphasized on whether researchers shall betrained to be science communicators or the journalists shall be given deeper insight into sciencecommunication. The invited speakers were selected in a way to represent various perspectives and be

able to present different points of view, pros and cons of different approaches. Raffalella Di Ioriofrom the European Commission (DG Research, Scientific Culture and Gender Issues) presented thepriorities and expectation of the European Commission towards science communication to the society.Peter Grnberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics from Germany made some good examples on howimportant science in the daily life is and how to communicate it in a way that is understandable towider public. His presentation was named explaining physics with simple pictures, although thepresentation was absolutely simple for Prof. Grnberg, most of the audience did not understand mostof what he said. This emphasized the fact that a specialised and trained team of journalists isrequired to correctly interpret and convey the information to the general public. Istvan Palugai,

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editor of a Hungarian Newspaper and well known science communicator presented his perspectives,short history of science communication and its challenges in the future. Nuno Crato, professor ofmathematics from Portugal who was awarded EU science communicator prize in 2007 presented theperspective of a scientist who in addition to his daily work publishes on a regular base scientificarticles in non scientific press. The session was concluded with the presentation of Steven Miller fromUK, Director of the European Science Communication Workshops, ESCoNet, organizing training on

science communications for researchers. The composition of the panel enabled the discussion on thepossibilities of cooperation between scientists and journalists.

During the first afternoon session the focus was made on Ethics in Research. In order to present theproblem in a practical and not too theoretical way, the issue was presented on the example ofresearch on mummies (How are ethics justified by research on mummies?). the emphasis was made onTZI the Iceman, who is on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, one of theworlds best known and most important mummies. The discussion was moderated by Albert Zink,Paleopathologist, Scientific Director of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman. TheEuropean Commissions views on ethics in research were presented by Stefan de Vos (EuropeanCommission, DG Research, Ethics Review). The ethical aspects taken into consideration duringevaluation of projects were explained and the evaluation process was elaborated. The fact that noethical framework related to archaeology and Mummies in the FP7 was underlined and suggestions forfuture work towards in this direction were emphasised. Wilfried Rosendahl, the Curator of thecomplex of museums REM in Mannheim, Germany shared his experience on the exhibitions of mummiesand various aspects connected with their preservation. Frank Rhli, Anatomist and Academic from theUniversity of Zurich, Switzerland talked about his research on mummies and ethical issues connectedwith it. In his summary Dario Piombino-Mascali, Anthropologist from the EURAC Institute for Mummiesand the Iceman stressed the importance of research on mummies in terms of culture, history but alsogenetics and medicine.

In the second afternoon session journalists from various European countries were presenting theirexperience in science communication and approaches in their countries. The topics touched upon

were: what kind of science communication exist in Europe and what is its future; what are the lessonsto be learned from those practices, what are the best practices; how can be wider public be reached;is science communication PR? Radek Brzozka from Poland represented Polish public TV TVP, gave arefreshing presentation on how journalists can make their reports interesting and awaken the curiosityof general public towards complex issues of science; kr Kaya from Turkey made a presentation onwhat is done in Turkey in the field of communicating science (example of Bilim ve Teknik); MarioMartinoli from Italy, representing European Research Media Centre youris.com talked about thechallenges of finding the common path between research and communication, and the need to adaptto the constant changes in the methods of communication; Kathleen Van Damme from Belgium,representing AthenaWeb presented an online tool for publishing movies on scientific topics, andhighlighted the impact that well done short films can have on the public; Bettina Weiz from Germany,working for the public radio channel Bayrischer Rundfunk made examples of scientific radioprogrammes, in particular in the field of social sciences. The journalists were discussing the role of

their media in science communication, why science is on agenda of their media, what challenges arebeing faced and how the researchers shall approach media in order to communicate their research inthe proper way.

One session of the conference was also directly dedicated to the conclusion of the project. Therepresentatives of all project workshops were present and shared their impressions from the timespent with the journalists in the labs. Some of them said the workshop were a kind of win-winexchange, just because it made them aware there are things they may learn from the journalists interms of communicating with media. Therefore the projects was absolutely useful not only for thejournalists but for the scientists as well (in particular those who claim that media often misinterpret

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what the researchers say just because the researchers often do not know how to communicateproperly).

The second part of the project conclusion was prize award to the authors of four best media workswritten after the workshop. One of them participated in the Vienna workshop, two in the Pragueworkshop and one in the Bolzano Humanities workshop. Three of those four journalists were presentat the conference. As the price they received the invitation to write for Academia EURAC sciencemagazine. They will be paid for the publication of 3 articles. They were also reimbursed the expensesrelated to their travel to the conference.

ParticipantsThe conference was advertised among all partner networks, campaign multipliers and other potentialparticipants. All project participants (young journalists) were also invited.