Past-President Duncan Nicholas travelled to Puchberg am Schneeberg, Austria, to deliver an EASE workshop of Science Communication at EMPSEB29 – the 29th European Meeting of PhD Students in Evolutionary Biology.
This meeting is an entirely student-organised event founded in Zurich in 1995, passing on to a new organising team and location each year, and was characterised by a fantastic atmosphere of enthusiasm and camaraderie between the 70 participants from all over the world.
The meeting provided a forum for many students to deliver oral presentations of their specialist research for the first time, to which Duncan added perspectives from the world of publishing, a two-hour practical workshop in effectively communicating their work to peers and public, and developing their profile as a researcher. Duncan included an introduction EASE and the many resources we have to offer.
The room was active with participation in exercises including summarising projects to different audiences, writing in plain language, thinking of multiple multi-media formats and the layers of different messaging possible from a single article.
The meeting also featured an EDI panel discussion that Duncan participated in, presenting initiatives such as the SAGER Guidelines, C4DISC and research and efforts across the publishing industry.
Huge thanks to Nhu Tran for inviting EASE to take part, and congratulations to the organising team Alaa Hseiky, Florian Strahodinsky, Pranav Unnikrishnan, Alan Flatrès, and Gulsamal Askarova for your warm hospitality and a superb event.
A side note of interest, which plenary speaker Hanna Kokko mentioned in her talk on Wednesday, Austrian biologist Paul Kemmerer stayed at this very hotel in Puchberg before taking his own life after a Nature paper claimed the results of his research into evidence that Larmarckian evolution were fraudulent.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/toad-fraud-may-have-been-ahead-of-his-time-1-16517997/
