Dance your science!?

Research isn't complete until it’s written down and has been shared to others - communicating your research is an ethical duty! Normally, scientists share their results to other scientists by publication in peer-reviewed journals or by presenting their results on scientific conferences. The peer-reviewing offers a quality check of your research as the peer-reviewers are supposed to be other researchers within the field that have the knowledge to understand your work exactly.

from http://undsci.berkeley.edu/

Another very important part is communicating what happens in science to the public. Science has a big impact on humanity and for people to be able to understand what long lasting effects it will have on society and to decide in what direction they want science to go, they need to understand the surrounding issues. Here, journalists reporting scientific news play an important role, but also universities around the world that need to do a good job at training future scientists to communicate and become storytellers!

This is a challenging task as the scientific language barriers to overcome may be huge. I often find myself stuck with awkward terminology when describing my research to friends and family. Something that actually is pretty easy to understand and very interesting, turns into something boring and complicated just because I’m using the wrong words.

An alternative way to make your research interesting for the public could perhaps be by a dance (!). This, not too serious but yet very entertaining, approach was introduced by the biologist John Bohannon who invented the Science Magazine’s Dance your PhD competition. In this competition PhD students present their research topics by a dance performance. Here are two of my favorite productions which also are material science related!


A super-alloy is born: The romantic revolution of Lightness & Strength from Peter Liddicoat on Vimeo.

Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story from Joel Miller on Vimeo.